Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness, on the confines of the two everlasting empires necessity and free will.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is but always to be blest.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.

The eye of a human being is a microscope which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of posterity.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century, than in all of previous human history.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles to be sure, but scattered along life's pathway the good they do is inconceivable.

World belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader, or that king, or prince, or religious leader. World belongs to humanity.

As human beings our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than many have thought.

Humanity either makes or breeds or tolerates all its afflictions.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

Property, as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

There are people who, the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.

Me only have one ambition, y'know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that's all.

Man is a goal seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

The man of wisdom has no perplexity, the man of humanity has no worry, the man of courage has no fear.

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare, social justice can never be attained.

Thoughtless dilettante or purblind wordlings sometimes ask us "What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?" To this I answer "If we left off fighting you would soon find out".

He that has done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.

Conflicts and factions, violence and upheavals are caused by the neglect of human values in daily life.

My task is the spiritual regeneration of Humanity through Truth and Love.

Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Deny the passport, throw it away and make a great decision that you will not leave this shore until and unless you have liberated all the human beings.

Humans are not proud of their ancestors and rarely invite them round to dinner.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

We have not come into the world to be numbered; we have been created for a purpose; for great things: to love and be loved.

The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

I speak to the black experience but I am always talking about the human condition - about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity reason and justice tell me I ought to do.

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.

The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.

All of us are living with dogmas that we accept as truths. When one of these is overturned, there's an initial gasp soon followed by a rush of exhilaration.

Only selfless service can encourage a person to reach the higher state of humanity.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest, that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us, but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.

Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.

We cannot despair of humanity since we ourselves are human beings.

Everything for me is sacred, beginning with earth, but also going to things made by man.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

I try not to speak about all the charities and people I help, because I believe we can only be truly generous when we expect nothing in return.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong.

That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race - Dis a war.

Live for yourself and you will live in vain; live for others, and you will live again.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance, and art would be useless.

No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.

People who love each other fully and truly are the happiest people in the world. They may have little, they may have nothing, but they are happy people. Everything depends on how we love one another.

People are generally irrational, unreasonable and selfish. They deserve to be loved, anyway.

None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.

Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness or else forgiving another.

And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth, next to humans.

All humanity is passion, without passion religion, history, novels, art, would be ineffectual.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice he is the worst of all.

There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere and we are all apt to expect too much, but then if one scheme of happiness fails human nature turns to another, if the first calculation is wrong we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere...

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue and abiding love.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

To be good is noble, but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.

Truly great people in history never wanted to be great for themselves. All they wanted was the chance to do good for others and be close to God.

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Selfless service alone gives the needed strength and courage to awaken the sleeping humanity in one's heart.

As from a large heap of flowers many garlands and wreaths are made, so by a mortal in this life there is much good work to be done.

We are all alike on the inside.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

America is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.

One way or another we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, desire.

I will far rather see the race of man extinct, than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God's creation, woman, the object of our lust.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

The search for truth is in one way hard, and in another way easy, for it is evident that no one can master it fully or miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the facts assembled there arises a certain grandeur.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.

People say I make strange choices, but they're not strange for me. My sickness is that I'm fascinated by human behavior, by what's underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.

The human race is a race of cowards, and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.

Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.

But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

There is only one caste, the caste of humanity. All of us belong to the human race, so everyone is equal. Therefore, love each one equally.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events and in the total, of all those acts, will be written the history of this generation.

For where God built a church there the Devil would also build a chapel.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

Race hate isn't human nature, race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

All human history attests, That happiness for man - the hungry sinner! Since Eve ate apples much depends on dinner.

Since I move about with you, eat like you and talk with you, you are deluded in the belief that this is but an instance of common humanity. Be warned against this mistake. I am also deluding you by My singing with you, talking with you, and engaging Myself in activities with you. But any movement My Divinity may be revealed to you, you have to be ready prepared for that moment.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

I went straight from shenanigans to cries against humanity.

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers and political power, and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Human beings must have action, and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

Nor shall derision prove powerful against those who listen to humanity, or those who follow in the footsteps of divinity, for they shall live forever. Forever.

All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery, rather than avenge it?

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still, small voice of conscience.

I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the Earth.

If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked.

We may have found a cure for most evils, but we have found no remedy for the worst of them, all the apathy of human beings.

Morality is of the highest importance - but for us not for God.

You have a nice personality but not for a human being.

America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead they overlap and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

A perfection of means and confusion of aims seems to be our main problem.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class, except Congress.

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.

Such is the human race often it seems a pity that Noah... didn't miss the boat.

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

The man of noble mind seeks to achieve the good in others and not their evil. The little-minded man is the reverse of this.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

The fear and anxiety that infect humanity today are the results of this degradation of values, this ignorance of what is of significance and what is not, this want of faith in what the elders and sages have handed down as the wisdom of ages. People prefer what is pleasing to what is beneficial.

In matters of truth and justice there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction, like that of religion, which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

A belief in hell, and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton, have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.