Theodor Mommsen Quotes

The history of Africa goes back into the dim recesses of time and antiquity. There are even scientists in our time who are beginning to claim that Africa was the very cradle of mankind

One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.

For the source of any characteristic so widespread and uniform as this adaptation to environment we must go back to the very beginning of the human race.

It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole.

So far, therefore, as we can draw safe conclusions from a single specimen, there has been no marked change of race in the human population of Switzerland during the periods above considered.

Is the human race a universal constructor?

I find a tremendous receptivity among the public for the subject matter of, 'Where did we come from and how did we get here?' People are thirsty and hungry for information on our origins. I feel a responsibility as a major figure in the area... to convey to the public the knowledge of human origins in a way that is understandable to them.

We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.

When we look for the origins of all humanity today, let's not just look at Europe, because I think Africa was the cradle, the crucible that created us as Homo sapiens.

Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal - 'translatable' into any cultural idiom.

The trend of all knowledge at the present is to specialize, but archaeology has in it all the qualities that call for the wide view of the human race, of its growth from the savage to the civilized, which is seen in all stages of social and religious development.

I was brought up in Florence, a beautiful medieval town whose rhythm is completely in antiquity.

The evidence points to central Asia as man's original home, for the general movement of human migrations has been outward from that region and not inward.

Everyone is related to Africa; everyone comes from Africa. We are all distant relatives.

I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.

There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

The human race will then become one family, and the world will be the dwelling of Rational Men.

What if I told you every single person in America - every single person on Earth - is African? With a small scrape of cells from the inside of anyone's cheek, the science of genetics can even prove it.

No national sovereignty rules in outer space. Those who venture there go as envoys of the entire human race.

Pirates have been regarded by all civilized nations as the enemies of the human race, and the most atrocious violators of the universal 184 law of society. (a) They are everywhere pursued and punished with death, and the severity with which the law has animadverted upon this crime arises from its enormity and danger, the cruelty that accompanies it, the necessity of checking it, the difficulty of detection, and the facility with which robberies may be committed upon pacific traders in the solitude of the ocean. Every nation has a right to attack and exterminate them without any declaration of war … they are not considered as a national body, or entitled to the laws of war, as one of the community of nations.

The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury

Indians are immigrants like everyone else, they just came earlier

Seeing this and envying it, the enemy of the human race, who always opposes all good men so that the race may perish, has thought up a way, unheard of before now, by which he might impede the saving word of God from being preached to the nations. He has stirred up some of his allies who, desiring to satisfy their own avarice, are presuming to assert far and wide that the Indians of the West and the South who have come to our notice in these times be reduced to our service like brute animals, under the pretext that they are lacking the Catholic Faith. And they reduce them to slavery (Et eos in servitutem redigunt), treating them with afflictions they would scarcely use with brute animals….Therefore, We, ... noting that the Indians themselves indeed are true men and are not only capable of the Christian faith, but, as has been made known to us, promptly hasten to the faith, and wishing to provide suitable remedies for them, by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples-even though they are outside the faith-who shall hereafter come to the knowledge of Christians have not been deprived or should not be deprived of their liberty or of their possessions

I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity — not for a sect, or a party, or for a country or a colour — but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do good.