“It is arguable that when Humanists, "Shook off," as people say, "the trammels of religion," and discovered things of this world as objects of veneration in their own right... they began to lose the finer appreciation of even the world itself. Thus to the Christian centuries, the flesh was holy (or sacer at least in one sense or the other), and they veiled its awful majesty; to the Humanist centuries it was divine in its own right, and they exhibited it. Now it is the commonplace of the magazine cover. It has lost its numen. So too with the cult of knowledge for its own sake declining from the Revival of Learning to the Brains Trust.”
Source: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio
“While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more ennobled by mental cultivation than others—but none in themselves nobler than others.”
Source: Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe: Part One, 1858
“Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be.”
Source: OEUVRES, T. 2. FONCTIONS FUCHSIENNES
“Stand in the Word of God. It will give you victory over the toughest storms.”
Source: A Manual for Victory
“Until the state or the church takes full responsibility for a newborn, no bill or bible is qualified to even offer suggestions on a woman's right to abortion.”
Source: Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society
“The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn't help, but love them a little bit.
Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn't universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other.”
Source: Babylon’s Ashes
“We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth,
Neither mortal or immortal,
So that with freedom of choice and with honor,
As thought the maker and molder of thyself,
Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul's judgment,
to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.”
Source: Oration on the Dignity of Man
“We humans who art on Earth
Humanity is special
Our kingdom has come
Do what we innately know to be right
On earth, because that's all there is
Share the bread we have
Try not to screw up
When others screw up, understand
We can't have everything that tempts us
Deliver ourselves from evil
Because this is it, the Earth,
The power to do right and the glory to come if we do is ours
Now and forever,
Hu-man.”
“Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it.”
Source: How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
“There is no actual need of humans to be a pious like an angel, it's a big chase to be a human and for me it's enough to be a human.”