1,042 Quotes About Mankind

The answer to the riddle posed by identity groups is that they are one entity and their identity is that of their ideal. There can be no shared identity among people, as each person is unique.

A self is not consciousness and a self is not life. A self is the unique positioning of an individual relative to society. Self is a wholly social creation.

The field of psychology has been less than successful at explaining human behaviour. It has been far less successful at establishing a normative ideal for human development.

The best of Man is not better than the least of God

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]

When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.

Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!

Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?

Gazing on a trillion stars, each reticent; mankind sells itself the illusion of accomplishment