Top 100 Humane Quotes
#1. Immigration should be enforced in a proportional and humane manner.
Roger Mahony
#2. It is possible to become discouraged about the injustice we see everywhere. But God did not promise us that the world would be humane and just. He gives us the gift of life and allows us to choose the way we will use our limited time on earth. It is an awesome opportunity.
Cesar Chavez
#3. One way [to recovery] would be by creating the best possible romance book or happy ending scenario for you ... out od your own experience. Another way would be to look at it as it is: a wake-up call to action to create a more humane world, without discrimination and sexism.
Elina Juusola
#4. If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.
James D. Watson
#5. I suspect that no community will become humane and caring by restricting what its members can say.
Derek Bok
#6. We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.
Irving Babbitt
#7. The light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity, reason is the pace ... And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities.
Thomas Hobbes
#8. The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George Santayana
#9. Any humane and reasonable person must conclude that if the ends, however desireable, are uncertain and the means are horrible and certain, these means must not be employed.
Howard Zinn
#10. Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.
Andrew O'Hagan
#11. It is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.
H.G.Wells
#12. Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
Virginia Woolf
#13. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
John Perry Barlow
#14. It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.
Bernard Berenson
#15. I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short- a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.
George Bernard Shaw
#16. It is, therefore, a fact that anybody who wants to realise Truth or who wants to be humane, must follow non-violent ways of life, otherwise he will not be able to reach the Truth.
Morarji Desai
#17. It never was our guise to slight the poor, or aught humane despise.
Homer
#18. I do understand why a desperate engineer still use a hammer
to solve a hard problem. I think, that made him more humane.
Toba Beta
#19. I always get that. Who are you? Here's who I am: I'm that dog that dropped off down at the humane society, and he has about every breed in it. Whatever the situation is, you try to bring that breed out that helps success.
Jim McElwain
#20. A certain amount of anger doesn't make us less empathetic, less humane, less loving. It just makes us real.
Lindsay Duncan
#21. Purdom has created a major body of work. Thoughtful, humane, intelligent, extrapolative, involving, his stories are exactly the sort of thing our genre exists to make possible. If you don't like Tom Purdom, you don't like science fiction. Period.
Michael Swanwick
#22. Here we also see: what this divinity lacks is not only a sense of shame-and there are also other reasons for conjecturing that in several respects all of the gods could learn from us humans. We humans are-more humane.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#23. Americans, we passionately believe, are a humane people. We showed that in restoring wounded economies abroad after World War II, even those of our enemies, Germany and Japan.
Anthony Lewis
#24. Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one whokills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
Anton Chekhov
#25. Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menagerie of hotheads, saber rattlers, cretins and crackpots.
Tom Shales
#26. It is beyond my comprehension that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simply because others use it for different purposes.
Steven Gould
#27. The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.
John Eric Erichsen
#28. The offspring of nationalist thinking too often expresses itself in exclusionary and passively-violent legal policies, and then sadly, through militarism, which becomes manifest on the endless blood-soaked borders and battlefields of humanity's great failure as a humane species.
Bryant McGill
#29. There is no humane way to rule people against their will.
Naomi Klein
#30. Animal experiments are no joke. Thank goodness scientists are finding better, more humane ways to develop treatments for cancer and other killer diseases.
Carol Leifer
#31. The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
H.L. Mencken
#32. Amy Grech has a cinematographer's eye, and a surgeon's hand - at once brutal and tender, unsettling yet humane. These stories linger like traces of an acid trip. Highly recommended!"
- Jay Bonansinga, National Best-Selling Author of Twisted, Frozen,
and The Sinking of the Eastland
Jay Bonansinga
#33. My own field, the prevention of genetic disorders in babies, has been possible only because of humane work on animals.
Robert Winston
#34. Nature make us more kind, more humane, more beautiful, and more natural.
Debasish Mridha
#35. The theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane.
Anton Chekhov
#36. What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame. What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#37. Humans. Violent but peace-loving. Passionate but cerebral. Humane but cruel. Impulsive but calculating. Generous but selfish. Humans. Altogether a contradictory and deeply flawed species. And yet ... And yet, somehow I knew that they represented the best hope of the galaxy. Perhaps the only hope.
Katherine Applegate
#38. Humane people don't start revolutions, they start libraries. And cemeteries.
Jean-Luc Godard
#39. It is not socialist, as some of our critics contend. It isn't purely capitalist, either. It is a new way. A third way. A more humane, trusting, productive, exhilarating, and, in every sense, rewarding way.
Ricardo Semler
#40. Humane sentiments are baseless, mad, and improper; they are incredibly feeble; never do they withstand the gainsaying passions, never do they resist bare necessity.
Marquis De Sade
#41. In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
Steven Pinker
#42. The work of volunteer groups throughout our country represents the very heart and soul of America. They have helped make this the most compassionate, generous, and humane society that ever existed on the face of this earth.
Ronald Reagan
#43. I believe we can create a truly humane, sustainable, and health food production system without killing any animals. I imagine a revolution in veganic agriculture in which small farmers grow a variety of vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes, all fertilized with vegetable sources.
Gene Baur
#44. The only solution to pollution is a people's humane revolution!
Bobby Seale
#45. I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for deciding between diverse interests, then voting, of course, can be regarded as a humane and civilized process.
Robert Musil
#47. The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.
Adolf Hitler
#48. One hates to be absolute, but in my view, there is no such thing as humane meat.
Ingrid Newkirk
#49. [Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?
Frank Harris
#50. Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;
And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,
But has not answer'd like the apparatus
Of the Humane Society's beginning,
By which men are unsuffocated gratis:
What wondrous new machines have late been spinning.
Lord Byron
#51. We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology.
Sam Kean
#52. Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
Barbara Kingsolver
#53. Every [person] of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits [his or her] convictions, but we must all protest.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#55. A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence ... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem.
Robert Motherwell
#56. We need a human presence at the border and a humane presence at the border.
David Dewhurst
#57. When political figures are shown on television or in movies, it's always the liberal Democrats that are shown to be humane, caring people.
Pat Boone
#58. To have control of my own mind ... to go with dignity is less terryfying. When I look at both options I have to die, I feel this is far more humane.
Brittany Maynard
#59. There is nothing truthful, wise, humane, or strategic about confusing hostility to injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense.
Michael Albert
#60. The lawgiver ought to be gentle, lenient and humane. The lawgiver ought to be a skilled architect who raises his building on the foundation of self-love, and the interest of all ought to be the product of the interests of each.
Cesare Beccaria
#63. Realizing our society as it is, without theology dogmatically telling us how we should react to it, and being humane toward that society, that is all that we're sure of.
Vidal Sassoon
#64. With regard to life, modern painting is a revolutionary activity ... We need it in order to transform the world into a more humane place where mankind can live in liberty ... We must accept these things with passion. It means that we must live imaginatively.
Wifredo Lam
#65. Live and let live was the famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me to be more humane than all the categorical imperatives, and it maintained itself throughout all classes.
Stefan Zweig
#66. If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken.
Henry David Thoreau
#67. A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am.
Henry Louis Gates
#68. In actual fact the pacifistic-humane idea is perfectly all right perhaps when the highest type of man has previously conquered and subjected the world to an extent that makes him the sole ruler of this earth ... Therefore, first struggle and then perhaps pacifism.
Adolf Hitler
#69. I didn't say anything at all, because somehow saying nothing seemed more humane than giving him all these reassurances.
Jennifer Brown
#70. Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call 'cultural studies.
Christopher Hitchens
#71. I think a Play the best divertisement that wise men have: but I do also think them nothing so who do discourse so formallie about the rules of it, as if 'twere the grand affair of humane life.
Aphra Behn
#73. Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.
Howard Zinn
#74. The bad man is the man who no matter how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.
John Dewey
#75. I like the idea of bringing cartoon characters to life ... and although the Americans have already attempted this, their culture is not sufficiently humane to make it work.
Gerard Depardieu
#76. It is cruelty to be humane to rebels, and humanity is cruelty.
Robert Burns
#77. I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the boundaries and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and imagination that can take us into the future.
Terry Tempest Williams
#78. I am excited to work with NBC News to continue to highlight stories of organizations and individuals who make their communities and our world healthier, more just and more humane.
Chelsea Clinton
#80. We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live.
Matthew Specktor
#81. Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.
Daniel Alarcon
#82. To be meek, patient, tactful, modest, honorable, brave, is not to be either manly or womanly; it is to be humane.
Jane Harrison
#83. Our moral responsibility is not to stop future, but to shape it ... to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.
Alvin Toffler
#84. To me, a wise and humane policy is occasionally to let inflation rise even when inflation is running above target.
Janet Yellen
#86. The Humane Society is so great to work with. Because everyone there is so nice and supportive, and they're all animal lovers like me.
Bella Thorne
#87. Though bonobos tend to be a lot hairier than us - and they don't build houses or churches or Pentagons like we do - these primates look and act remarkably human. They often even go beyond the merely "human," and enter the realm of the truly "humane.
Susan Block
#88. To be humane, we must ever be ready to pronounce that wise, ingenious and modest statement 'I do not know'.
Galileo Galilei
#89. The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.
Victor Hugo
#90. The heavens may be far from humane, but I'd had about all I could take. So
Bohumil Hrabal
#92. It is one of history's great ironies that capitalists built decent and humane societies on the basis of an amoral approach to the economics of pricing, whereas socialists built exploitative and inhumane societies on the basis of a morally inflamed approach to economics.
Kevin D. Williamson
#93. The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.
Frederick Law Olmsted
#94. I am kind; I am humane. I open to you my fatherly arms. Come, all of you; I will receive you all - no less those of the South than those of the West, and of the North, who, gained over by Rigaud, have deserted your firesides, your wives, your children, to place yourselves at his side.
Toussaint Louverture
#95. We have one world. We have one chance; to be a united force of positive strength, to feed humanity the light of being humane.
Jessica Edouard
#96. Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.
Maxim Gorky
#97. If you're looking at the Bible for a guide to living a compassionate, wise and humane life, well, frankly you've got more chance of finding a lap dancing club in Mekka or a virgin in a catholic orphanage.
Pat Condell
#98. If you can't save the forest, plant a tree. - Mr. Morrison, Humane Society volunteer
Peg Kehret
#99. In 1790 we had less than eight hundred thousand slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system they have increased above four millions.
Robert Toombs
#100. Extreme poverty threatens people's right to life itself and makes impossible the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms essential to a humane way of life.
Daisaku Ikeda
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