#uma

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#human-rights #limitations #personal-autonomy #personal-responsibility #freedom

Most people hugely underestimate the amount of 'empty space' we have in our country. Fly over the U.K., and you see that human settlement does not fill up the U.K. at all. It accounts for something of the order of 15 per cent of the landmass. ↗

— Evan Davis

#amount #cent #country #does #empty

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence. ↗

— Peter Davison

#because #embarrassed #existence #extraordinarily #friends

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. ↗

— George Orwell

#human-nature #humour #philosophy #art

The trifle now inscribed with your name. was occasioned by a particular fact; but to the disgrace of human nature, the subject is sufficiently general to interest every heart not totally impenetrable. ↗

— Thomas Day

#every #every heart #fact #general #heart

I don't understand why people insist on pitting concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can't they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid package that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What's wrong with that idea? ↗

— Garth Stein

#humans #spirituality #art

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#human-condition #art

To my mind, there is a reason that music is there and it's about being human. ↗

— Kim Deal

#being #being human #human #mind #music

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. ↗

— Eugene V. Debs

#centers #chicago #commercial #great #habitation

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern. ↗

— Barbara Deming

#argument #concern #heart #human #more