Human Life Quotes - Page 16

• Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life.

  Coretta Scott King

  Justice, Death Penalty, Humans

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• When I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls Thus finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist; with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Believe, Water, Soul

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• It is not a question of patronizing philanthropy towards disabled people. They do not need the patronage of the non-disabled. It is not for them to adapt to the dominant and dominating world of the so-called non-disabled. It is for us to adapt our understanding of a common humanity; to learn of the richness of how human life is diverse; to recognize the presence of disability in our human midst as an enrichment of our diversity.

  Nelson Mandela

  Common Humanity, Diversity, People

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• What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

  H. L. Mencken

  May, Humans, Knows

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• The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

  Aldous Huxley

  Life, Routine, Natural

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1930-1935”, Ivan R Dee

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• Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Self, Trying, Doe

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.124

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• A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life.

  Pliny the Elder

  Death, Sovereign, Humans

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• Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and urgencies are priests and pastors.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Humanity, Church, Needs

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• One can argue that in the context of history a few years do not matter. But we live in an age in which every moment counts heavily and the price of delay is human lives.

  Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

  Years, Age, Delay

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• Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

  Rebecca West

  Blow, Destiny, Names

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.545, Open Road Media

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• Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Disappointment, Events, Deities

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1833). “The Last Man”, p.42

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• We don't consider manual work as a curse, or a bitter necessity, not even as a means of making a living. We consider it as a high human function, as the basis of human life, the most dignified thing in the life of the human being, and which ought to be free, creative. Men ought to be proud of it.

  David Ben-Gurion

  Mean, Men, Creative

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• Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Passion, Emotional, Burning

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher “Vermont Tradition: The Biography of an Outlook on Life”

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• Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself.

  John Stuart Mill

  Men, Firsts, Life Is

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.196, Hackett Publishing

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• But my belief is growing that our political and social evils are remediable, if only all of us who want a change for the better just get up and work for it, all the time, with as much knowledge and intelligence as we can muster for it. Half the wrongs of human life exist because of the inertia of people who simply will not use their energies in fighting for what they believe in. And finally the wrongs roll up into world catastrophes and millions of deaths and a terrible set-back for all mankind.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Believe, Fighting, People

  Katherine Anne Porter, Isabel Bayley (1994). “Letters of Katherine Anne Porter”, p.291, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Fate, Political, Politics

  Katherine Anne Porter, Darlene Harbour Unrue (2008). “Collected stories and other writings”

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• Mostly actors are progressive because we are accustomed to all the nuances of human life, whereas dictators just try to flatten it all out. So we usually try to stand up to dictators like, well, we won't mention names.

  Jane Fonda

  Names, Trying, Actors

  Interview with Lord Puttnam, www.theguardian.com. June 3, 2005.

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• The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one as the age of innocence, the other of reason.

  Joseph Joubert

  Life, Age, Innocence

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

  Camille Paglia

  Rose, Elements, Flight

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.26, Canongate Books

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• I understood why war zones are called 'theaters' because they frame a kind of play acting or, worse, deceit, that can stain a human life forever: the deceit of hate on hearsay - hating an enemy one doesn't know.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Hate, War, Play

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• The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Light, Dust, Sea

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• However constant the visitations of sickness and bereavement, the fall of the year is most thickly strewn with the fall of human life. Everywhere the spirit of some sad power seems to direct the time; it hides from us the blue heavens, it makes the green wave turbid; it walks through the fields, and lays the damp ungathered harvest low; it cries out in the night wind and the shrill hail; it steals the summer bloom from the infant cheek; it makes old age shiver to the heart; it goes to the churchyard, and chooses many a grave.

  James Martineau

  Summer, Fall, Heart

  James Martineau (1858). “Endeavors after the Christian life: discourses”, p.227

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• Of earth's goods, the best is a good wife; a bad, the bitterest curse of human life.

  Simonides of Ceos

  Wife, Earth, Curse

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• We have always borne part of the weight of war, and the major part ... Men have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! ... We pay the first cost on all human life.

  Olive Schreiner

  War, Gun, Men

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• Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

  Karen Armstrong

  Art, Effort, Creative

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