Wisdom on the Topic of humanism
Quotations
All must be held valuable, or none
“But none of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates,” Fen added dryly, “suggest that our judgments are scarcely infallible… And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn’t a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage.”
Apes and Humans
Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down – toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins.
The center of every man's existence is a dream
The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
Chimps and Humans
On the basis of all the evidence, the closest relative of the human proves to be the chimp. The closest relative of the chimp is the human. Not orangs, but people. Us. Chimps and humans are nearer kin than are chimps and gorillas or any other kinds of ape not of the same species.
Imagination is not a means of making money
In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don’t work. Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples. Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.
I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination.
Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.
An Invincible Summer
In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
An Irreplaceable Compact
Euthanasia, Cadogan thought: they all regard it as that, and not as wilful slaughter, not as the violent cutting-off of an irreplaceable compact of passion and desire and affection and will; not as a thrust into unimagined and illimitable darkness.
The modern horrors of bureaucracy
Yet the people here suffered, apparently, from the fact that they were employed not by an educational institution, but by a bureaucratic system. They were all, to a large extent, clerks, neatly bound up in red tape, and, like clerks, they gave themselves the illusion of freedom by discussing and ridiculing the strictures that bound them. Kate thought lovingly of her own university, where one struggled, God knew, against the ancient sins of favoritism, flattery, and simony, but where the modern horrors of bureaucracy had not yet strangled her colleagues or herself.
Monkeys with money and guns
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
We are monkeys with money and guns.
The Most Dangerous of Devotions
The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured – especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised.
Only a Human Being
I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.
The Rainbow Bridge
Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.
The Real Problem of Humanity
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
The sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency
Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves. This is a complicated biological fact about us.
Start with romance and build to a reality
I think it’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality. There’s hardly a scientist or an astronaut I’ve met who wasn’t beholden to some romantic before him who led him to doing something in life.
Symbolic Language
At the moment, the most powerful marker, the feature that distinguishes our species most decisively from closely related species, appears to be symbolic language. Many animals can communicate with each other and share information in rudimentary ways. But humans are the only creatures who can communicate using symbolic language: a system of arbitrary symbols that can be linked by formal grammars to create a nearly limitless variety of precise utterances. Symbolic language greatly enhanced the precision of human communication and the range of ideas that humans can exchange. Symbolic language allowed people for the first time to talk about entities that were not immediately present (including experiences and events in the past and future) as well as entities whose existence was not certain (such as souls, demons, and dreams).
To end up here in a pile of bones
Not until we showed them some of the stuff we got at Dachau, that George Stevens photographed with his crew, did it actually impinge itself on the mind of the horror, the horror of this whole thing. Man, the highest of all the animals… the Man who created God… to end up here in a pile of bones, burned… it left me just speechless, colorless, bloodless. I couldn’t possibly believe that there was this kind of savagery in the world, you see.
To prolong our presence on the face of the Earth
What we’re doing now is trying to think like nature, in the sense that we are aware that species that have gone before us have disappeared from the face of the Earth. We’d like to use our intelligence and our creative capacity to prolong our presence on the face of the Earth as long as possible. It requires, therefore, that we develop the kinds of tactics and strategies amongst ourselves so as to assure that this can occur, to assure that we will not destroy ourselves or the planet, to make it uninhabitable and to allow the fullness of the potential of the individual to be expressed, to flower.
To simply see human beings
If I ask you all today to look around and tell me who you see…. When you look around, I don’t want you to see black, white, Asian, I don’t want you to wonder if a person is Democrat or Republican, gay or straight. When you look around, I just want you to simply see human beings – nothing more, nothing less. And I guarantee you, if you can begin to see people that way, just as human beings, you’ll begin to treat them a little differently, you’ll begin to understand their points of view.
The Undisputed Sovereignty of the Human Being
Jazz insists on the undisputed sovereignty of the human being. In this technological era we can easily be fooled into believing that sophisticated machines are more important than progressive humanity. That’s why art is an important barometer of identity. The arts let us know who we are in all of our glory, reveal the best of who we are. All the political and financial might in the world is diminished when put to the service of an impoverished cultural agenda. We see it in our schools, in our homes, and in our world profile: rich and fat, lazy and morally corrupt, with wild, out-of-control young people.
We all know that civilization requires a supreme effort. Our technology will become outmoded, but the technology of the human soul does not change.
We All Derive From the Same Source
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
We are in Eden still
There runs a strange law through the length of human history – that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.
We're part of something continuous
Edith Pretty: We die. We die and we decay. We don’t live on.
Basil Brown: I’m not sure I agree. From the first human handprint on a cave wall, we’re part of something continuous. So, we… don’t really die.
When machines are considered more important than people
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.
A Work Ethic Gone Mad
The blend of corporate mysticism and transcendental consumerism he [Tom Peters] offers has its roots planted in the pragmatic, optimistic, can-do American work ethic. But, like the Taylorist philosophy from which it springs, it is also a work ethic gone mad. It begins with the idea that work can be meaningful and stretches it to the point where there is no meaning outside work. It becomes a deluded form of optimism, a feverish activity that masks an underlying anxiety about the meaning of life, a form of self-alienation so complete that the self disappears entirely into its consumer preferences and transactions.