#human

We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#culture #different #equality #happiness #humanity

Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's "morally chaotic All. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#human-nature #principles #equality

At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers? ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#capitalism #corporations #dam #economics #environmental-degradation

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit. ↗

— E.E. Cummings

#experience

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change? Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching. Harper: And then up you get. And walk around. Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending. Harper: That's how people change. ↗

— Tony Kushner

#god #human-condition #change

I keep hearing about a spiritual awakening, but I feel what we need instead, is a human one. It would be wonderful and empowering to become free from the disillusionment and nonsense being sold to us from gurus for centuries. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#guru #human #spiritual #experience

Joy is a net of love in which you can catch souls. ↗

— Mother Teresa

#love

Although I have always rejected this fear of the other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. at the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand ↗

— Susan Nathan

#racism #experience

The writers of religious scriptures and texts would have done humanity a grand service if they would have used just one sentence, in one of the pages out of the thousands, to support respectful and peaceful disagreement. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#humanity #peace #religion #respect #experience

Camus and Henry waved to me from that muddy truck. They both wanted me to get over myself. So, this was me, getting over myself. And it was about time. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#dating #existentialism #glass-girl #henry-whitmire #humanitarian