Kim Ki-duk Quotes

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

People are brutal. Just to each other.

The worst of faces still is human.

Films don't cause violence, people do. Violence defines our existence. To shield oneself is more dangerous than trying to reflect it.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human.

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I'm totally human.

Whether man is a product of evolution or is 'created' becomes the question, 'Who is man? Is he part of the world or something different from it?'

Our dream is to one day uncover the essence of what makes us human.

I'm not interested in showing the wish of what it looks like to be human. I'm interested in showing what it actually looks like.

If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots.

Are all humans human, or are some more human than others?

It makes life so much easier when you can just say 'I'm human' at the end of the day."

I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.