Essential Humanity Quotes

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.

Whatever men you take, keep the idea of man intact: let your soul wait whether your body does or not.

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

Human lives are human lives.

The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

Something nonhuman doesn’t become human by getting older and bigger; whatever is human is human from the beginning.

There is in us a spark of something good, something right and beautiful.

At the core of every child is an intact human.

The sciences that purport to treat of human things -- the new scientific storyings of the social, the political, the racial or ethnic, and the psychic, nature of human beings -- treat not of human things but mere things, things that make up the physical, or circumstantial, content of human life but are not of the stuff of humanity, have not the human essence in them.

For me what was very important was to try to capture the essence that might have existed behind the myth, the human essence of the character.

but you see, just because we've been...dealt a certain hand...it doesn't mean we can't choose to rise above- to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted. to try to retain whatever essential humanity we can.