Quotes about Humanity

It was a wicked game. "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

The worst of it was that those people out there-the fear, the suffering the wholesale death-did not really touch him. Crake used to say that Homo sapiens sapiens was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of a primal tribe, and Jimmy would reduce that number to two.

Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity; it's almost as necessary as bread. We cannot imagine ourselves without it, because the self is a story.

How easy it is to invent humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

This is a pattern humankind has repeated many times over the course of its history. When there is a crisis, whether real or imagined, culprits—whether real or imagined—must be found and eliminated.

Once they tried to save something, others or their own souls.

The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have been done before, more than once.

In this world you have to take your bits and ends of kindness where you can find them, as they do not grow on trees.

In any conflict between humanity and technology, humanity will win.

Philosophy began when man ate the produce of the earth and suffered indigestion.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The beginning of men's rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.