Liquor perverts the end of society, and unfits us for all those distinguishing and exquisite Feelings, which are the Cordials of Life, and the noblest Privileges of Humanity.
atrophy of feeling creates criminals.
I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.
Religion has played a big part in eliminating the nuance in humanity. People began to believe things before they knew them. It stopped people from listening and learning with the patience and love of the God they believe in.
This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.
Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.
I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don't despise it. But it can't quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.
Somehow we got used to death, and then we dehumanised it. We account for conflicts in figures. Ebola is 13,500 infected, 5,000 people have died... People are losing their sense of empathy, their sense of wanting to do something.
She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.
Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.
War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.
As a result of half a century of Soviet rule people have been weaned from a belief in human kindness.
When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity - what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.
Disbelief in the consequences of wrongdoing has coarsened our society and alienated us one from another.
Loss of empathy might well be the most enduring and deep-cutting scar of all, the silent blade of an unseen emey, tearing at our hearts and stealing more than our strength- Drizzt Do'Urden
So far as I can see the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages.
We've lost our way if we turn our backs on millions of Americans in need.
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
The effect of power and publicity on all men is an aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.
Nothing has saddened me so much in life as the hardness of heart of educated people.
When did we stop being people, being human?
