#mankind

God invented mankind because he loved silly stories. ↗

— Ralph Steadman

#god #invented #loved #mankind #silly

What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind. ↗

— Woodrow Wilson

#consent #governed #law #mankind #opinion

The more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men. ‘What a cold-blooded jest!’ said he to himself. ‘It was not devised by a God.’ From that time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art ↗

— Honoré de Balzac

#religion #art

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. ↗

— David McCullough

#civic-responsibility #history #humanity #life #mankind

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#capitalism #humnaity #life #mankind #money

Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#fallen-nations #futility #inevitability #knowledge #learning

They've never known a time when people drank rain water because it was pure, or could eat snow, or swim in any river or brook. The last time I drove to Washington the traffic was so bad that I could have made better time with a horse. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#brook #change #earth #environment #history

It is probable that for a long time to come the mass of mankind in civilized countries will find it both necessary and advantageous to labor for wages, and to accept the condition of hired laborers. ↗

— Leland Stanford

#advantageous #both #civilized #come #condition

In the mass of mankind, I fear, there is too great a majority of fools and knaves; who, singly from their number, must to a certain degree be respected, though they are by no means respectable. ↗

— Philip Stanhope

#certain degree #degree #fear #fools #great

The great men of a nation reach out to all mankind. They are unifying, not divisive; internationally conciliating and still great nationally. ↗

— Gustav Stresemann

#divisive #great #great men #internationally #mankind