The greatest obscenity is man's inhumanity to man. ~Robert Burns, 'Man Was Made To Mourn: A Dirge,' 1784 ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973 A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational and too serious to be temped by baubles. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness. He has told me that the greatest illusion of the human experience was the idea that we were outside of nature - that we were not a part of the food chain - that we were not animals ourselves. He did not discriminate between the mundane and the vital, the human and the animal, the tragic and the wonderful. Galen had told me that he gathered and kept anything that spoke to the nature of life on the islands.

The human species is made up of seven billion subspecies each consisting of one specimen. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742вЂ“1799), translated by Norman Alliston, 1908 The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species. Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. ~Jean Arp (1887вЂ“1966), 'The measure of all things,' translated by Ralph Manheim, 1948 He has tailored and pruned away at beauty. Then he quickly went to work and turned as much of the world as he could upside down. Pretty much at the beginning of his glorious development he coined the saying that man was the measure of all things. Man behaves as if he had created the world and could play with it.

~Joseph Baretti, quoted by James Boswell, 1766, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson (Thanks, Frank Lynch!) I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am. ~Ik Marvel (Donald Grant Mitchell, 1822вЂ“1908), Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons Poor Clarence, he is like the rest of the world, - whose goodness lies chiefly in the occasional throbs of a better nature, which soon subside, and leave them upon the old level of desire. ~Cid Ricketts Sumner, Tammy Out of Time, 1958 Human beings are generally considered a higher form, though there are times when I have my doubts. ~James Lendall Basford (1845вЂ“1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897 I believe he has many things to learn from animal societies, older than his own and of infinite variety. ~Mose Velsor (Walt Whitman), 'Manly Health and Training,' New York Atlas, 1858 October 10thДЇor my part, I am not so sure at bottom that man is, as he says, the king of nature he is far more its devastating tyrant. ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973ДЄll kinds of men, herculean, obstinate, petty, profound - men of oak and men of wax - meet you at every move, crowding and jostling through the by-ways of the world. For it was in the process of finishing himself that man got out from underneath nature's inexorable laws, and became her most formidable adversary. Man was nature's mistake - she neglected to finish him - and she has never ceased paying for her mistake. 'People are pretty stupid, aren't they, Dad?' Smother it as we may, it will some time set our souls on fire. Within us there is a living spark of the divine man. In each generation the human mind in every man reverts to its starting-point each new man is a primitive man. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound? ~Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind, 1921 We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. ~Edwin Markham, 'Man-Test,' The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 1913

He said, 'Behold! Yet this is not enough.' God mixed in man the raptures and the tearsДЄnd scattered thru his brain the starry stuff, Baird, 'The Theft of Thistledown: A Faery Interlude,' 1915Д¬hild of Heaven! Born from the womb of a star! ~James Lendall Basford (1845вЂ“1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897 Humankind Quotes & Sayings (Human Beings, Mankind, Being Human, Humanity, etc) The Quote Garden в„ўДЄlas! it is hard to be human! ~George M.В P.

We are not human beings quote