#human

It is often said that mankind needs a faith if the world is to be improved. In fact, unless the faith is vigilantly and regularly checked by a sense of man's fallibility, it is likely to make the world worse. From Torquemada to Robespierre and Hitler the men who have made mankind suffer the most have been inspired to do so have been inspired to do so by a strong faith; so strong that it led them to think their crimes were acts of virtue necessary to help them achieve their aim, which was to build some sort of an ideal kingdom on earth. ↗

— David Cecil

#evil #faith #fanaticism #fundamentalism #good-intentions

It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines ↗

— Mary MacLane

#nature

I hope people don't take kittens on a whim, like they would a toy, then not care for them. ↗

— Shirley Rousseau Murphy

#humane #impulse #kittens #money

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering. ↗

— Charles Bukowski

#job #money #money

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility. ↗

— Niall Ferguson

#humanity #man #money #money

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison. ↗

— J.B. Priestley

#psychology #sociology #nature

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. ↗

— Isabel Paterson

#humanitarianism #ideology #motivational

Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base... ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#god #good #humanity #religion #motivational

Cinnamon Girl" wasn't right for this day, for this time, for what was about to happen. If he were to have music, he thought, maybe Shostakovich, a few measures from the Lyric Waltz in Jazz Suite Number 2. Something sweet, yet pensive, with a taste of tragedy; Qatar was an intellectual, and he knew his music. ↗

— John Sandford

#music

What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (-- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End) ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#music #music