Human Relations Quotes & Sayings

A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world
intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.. — Aldous Huxley

We both see strangers and react. We don't like to walk by people without nodding. We're broken when people are rude. Were broken when people can't meet us halfway. We can't accept the limits of normal human relations-chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes. — Dave Eggers

It doesn't matter what word we use, if it has the same content, it will be treated in the same way. There are other words - there's "womanist," there's "mujerista," there's "women's liberationist" - all mean the same thing and they get the same ridicule. I think we just need to choose what word we feel comfortable with that says women are full human beings, and whatever that word is, it will get a lot of opposition. But it will also attract a lot of support. But this is a revolution, not a public relations movement. — Gloria Steinem

One of the tragic facts of human relations is the failure of people to realize that what they put out to other people they get right back from them. — Les Giblin

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark — Richard Rorty

For so many years, the official propaganda machinery had denounced humanitarianism as sentimental trash and advocated human relations based entirely on class allegiance. But my personal experience had shown me that most of the Chinese people remained kind, sensitive, and compassionate even though the cruel reality of the system under which they had to live compelled them to lie and pretend. Pg. 409 — Nien Cheng

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. — E. M. Forster

Learn to be friendly and learn to welcome all people, but note however in doing so that it is not every hand that is stretched towards you that deserves your handshake! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

All social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Judging a book by its cover was standard practice in human relations. — Kenneth Eade

In order that the relations between science and the age may be what they ought to be, the world at large must be made to feel that science is, in the fullest sense, a ministry of good to all, not the private possession and luxury of a few, that it is the best expression of human intelligence and not the abracadabra of a school, that it is a guiding light and not a dazzling fog. — William Jay Youmans

Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others. — Harsha Walia

So it is that supernatural horror is the product of a profoundly divided species of being. It is not the pastime of even our closest relations in the wholly natural world: we gained it, as part of our gloomy inheritance, when we became what we are. Once awareness of the human predicament was achieved, we immediately took off in two directions, splitting ourselves down the middle. One half became dedicated to apologetics, even celebration, of our new toy of consciousness. The other half condemned and occasionally launched direct assaults on this gift. — Thomas Ligotti

The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other. — Kenneth E. Boulding

We don't make bicycles anymore. It's all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everyone to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan. — Kurt Vonnegut

In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. "Having faith" in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change. — Erich Fromm

We should free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same " common sense." Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in the development of man, just as art has been. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy) ceases to be a virtue. — Erich Fromm

Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular. — Soren Kierkegaard

Human relations is the study of mankind, with the purpose of revealing and removing the basic causes of conflicts among men. — Validivar

Tolerance is a good cornerstone on which to build human relationships. — L. Ron Hubbard

You don't need human relationships to be happy, God has placed it all around us. — Christopher McCandless

The prisoner's dilemma may seem to represent a rather specific and unusual scenario, but in fact it shows up all over the place in human and animal life. It turns out, for example, to underlie arms races in international relations, inaction on climate change, obstacles to trade, and even natural phenomena such as why trees grow so tall - giant redwoods could save terrific resources by only growing to, say, 50 feet (they usually grow to over 200), but in the competition for light, whoever grows that bit taller at the expense of the others will do better. In — Dominic Johnson

One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognizes a human being in a slave. — Angelina Grimke

Racism is pure ignorance. We are part of the same race. The human race — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Science, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, is flexible and nondogmatic. It sticks to facts and to reality (which always can change) and to logical thinking (which does not contradict itself and hold two opposite views at the same time). But it also avoids rigid all-or-none and either/or thinking and sees that reality is often two sided and includes contradictory events and characteristics. Thus, in my relations with you, I am not a totally good person or a bad person but a person who sometimes treats you well and sometimes treats you badly. Instead of viewing world events in a rigid, absolute way, science assumes that such events, and especially human affairs, usually follow the laws of probability. — Albert Ellis

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections? — Elizabeth Janeway

A UNITED civilization is possible only when human relations are balanced in all transactions which have to do with the distribution of the values of life which all men persistently and constantly seek. — Walter Russell

Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted - and few have been able to resist the power for long - to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also. — Hans J. Morgenthau

The human being of all times prays because he cannot fail to wonder about the meaning of his life, which remains obscure and discomforting of it is not put in relations to the mystery of God and if his plan for the world. — Pope Benedict XVI

Geometry became a symbol for human relations, except that it was better, because in geometry things never go bad. If certain things occur, if certain lines meet, an angle is born. You cannot fail. It's not going to fail; it is eternal. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total. Thus, I'm able to avoid or manipulate or process pain. — Louise Bourgeois

My dear young friends, I want to invite you to "dare to love". Do not desire anything less for your life than a love that is strong and beautiful and that is capable of making the whole of your existence a joyful undertaking of giving yourselves as a gift to God and your brothers and sisters, in imitation of the One who vanquished hatred and death for ever through love (cf. Rev 5:13).
Love is the only force capable of changing the heart of the human person and of all humanity, by making fruitful the relations between men and women, between rich and poor, between cultures and civilizations. (Message for the 22nd World Youth Day: Palm Sunday, 1 April 2007) — Pope Benedict XVI

There are only two basic ways of structuring the relations between the female and male halves of humanity. All societies are patterned on either a dominator model - in which human hierarchies are ultimately backed up by force or the threat of force - or a partnership model, with variations in between. — Riane Eisler

Legal procedure has always tacitly been concerned with human relations, rather than abstract justice, and that consequently in spite of the legal codes it is really the human relations underneath that determine the verdicts in the courts. — James Jones

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along. — A.S. Byatt

[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region 'inside' us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, 'outside' rather than 'within' us - or rather it exists 'between' us, as our relationships do. — Terry Eagleton

Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power. — Adrienne Rich

And he thought about the Devil, in whom he did not believe, and he looked around at the two windows where the fires were gleaming. It seemed to him that out of those crimson eyes the Devil himself was looking at him--that unknown force that had created the mutual relation of the strong and the weak, that coarse blunder which one could never correct. That strong must hinder the weak from living--such was the law of Nature; but only in a newspaper article or in a schoolbook was that intelligible and easily accepted. In the hotchpotch which was everyday life, in the tangle of trivialities out of which human relations were woven, it was no longer a law, but a logical absurdity, when the strong and the weak were both equally victims of their mutual relations, unwillingly submitting to some directing force, unknown, standing outside life, apart from man. — Anton Chekhov

In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. — Bertrand Russell

I feel that we should not only maintain gentle, peaceful relations with our fellow human beings bur also that is very important to extend the same kind of attitude toward the natural environment. — Dalai Lama

Leadership is about tapping the wellsprings of human motivation - and about fundamental relations with one's fellows. — Tom Peters

We don't go further than what Marx called the exchange value of the actual object- we don't think about the relations that that object embodies- and were important to the production of that object, whether it's our food or our clothes or our iPads or all the materials we use to acquire an education at an institution like this. That would really be revolutionary to develop a habit of imagining the human relations and non-human relations behind all of the objects that constitute our environment. — Angela Davis

It is an understatement to say that the time has arrived for a serious and open international dialogue regarding the possibility of future interplanetary relations. In no other area of human experience has so much evidence existed for so long, and yet been attended by such a paucity of serious research and analysis - at least in the civilian domain. While the subject matter of UFOs itself is extraordinary, it is the absence of a serious human response to it that is most extraordinary. — Steven M. Greer

It is a mistake to consider marriage merely as a scheme of happiness. It is also a bond of service. It is the most ancient form of that social ministration which God has ordained for all human beings, and which is symbolized by all the relations of nature. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person's personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person's sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author's own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings. — George Eliot

I like the rough impersonality of New York ... Human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions-all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again. — Bill Bradley

Society is the total network of relations between human beings. The components of society are thus not human beings but relations between them. — Arnold Joseph Toynbee

God is the Lord of human history and of the personal history of every member of His redeemed family. — Margaret Clarkson

None of us get to choose our race but we all get to choose how we overcome its hurtles. Whether we jump or stumble...what matters most is that we take each moment in stride. Compassion, love, forgiveness and empathy will always win the human race. — Jason Versey

Unable to suspect others, unable to believe in others, one would to live in a suspended state, a state of bankrupt human relations, as if one were looking into a mirror that reflects nothing. — Kobo Abe

Human relations had become a cock-block. — David Pratt

I have no doubt that there will continue to be bumps, some serious crises indeed in our relationship with China ... Neither membership in the WTO nor normalized trade relations with the United States will magically impose the rule of law on China or institute deep-seeded respect for human rights. But it certainly has potential to advance those purposes. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

it is only in social relations that we are human...to be human women must share in the totality of humanity's common life. Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of organism, the individual or social body requires use of all of our powers in four areas: physical, intellectual, spiritual and social — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

He who is concerned only with the purity of his own life ruins the great human relations. — Confucius

The proposal that the human household originated in competition over food presents a challenge to conventional thinking because it holds economics as primary and sexual relations as secondary. — Richard W. Wrangham

When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness. My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do. Our duties originate, not from difference of sex, but from the diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care, and the different eras in which we live. — Angelina Grimke

The transcendent importance of love and goodwill in all human relations is shown by their mighty beneficent effect upon the individual and society. — George David Birkhoff

God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken. — Justine Larbalestier

Word: I'm not saying the races don't have a common human bond. I'm just saying that bond isn't about compassion and equality and tolerance. What we all share together is the drive to get what's ours and keep it for as long as we can. — Snoop Dogg

Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty. — Joyce Carol Oates

One's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations. — Jane Addams

Fashion and public relations share a charter to turn life to their own advantage, to make malleable and commercially useful the naked human perception. Both interests consider life too small, dull, and colorless to get itself sufficiently noticed without the lobbying efforts of professionals. — Kennedy Fraser

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else's children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose. — Aberjhani

There are a lot of movies with vampires and monsters and super-great effects, but if there's no humor or human relations, I don't think it's ever worth seeing. — Harald Zwart

Men have always wanted to have sex with as many fertile young women as possible. It's part of a man's basic programming. That hasn't changed. Civilization is nothing more than an artificial and very thin veneer hiding our deep-seated primitive urges. — Oliver Markus

Honest concern for others is the key factor in improving our day-to-day lives. When you are warm-hearted, there is no room for anger, jealousy, or insecurity. A calm mind and self-confidence are the basis for happy and peaceful relations with each other. Healthy, happy families and a healthy, peaceful nation are dependent on warm-heartedness. Some scientists have observed that constant anger and fear eat away at our immune system, whereas a calm mind strengthens it. We have to see how we can fundamentally change our education system so that we can train people to develop warm-heartedness early on in order to create a healthier society. I don't mean we need to change the whole system - just improve it. We need to encourage an understanding that inner peace comes from relying on human values like love, compassion, tolerance, and honesty, and that peace in the world relies on individuals finding inner peace. - HIS HOLINESS, THE DALAI LAMA — Debra Landwehr Engle

Suppose a problem in psychology was set: What can be done to persuade the men of our time - Christians, humanitarians or, simply, kindhearted people - into committing the most abominable crimes with no feeling of guilt? There could be only one way: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen, and so forth; which means, first, that they must be convinced of the existence of a kind of organization called 'government service,' allowing men to be treated like inanimate objects and banning thereby all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this 'government service' must be so unified that the responsibility for their dealings with men would never fall on any one of them individually. — Leo Tolstoy

What changed at the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, was not so much the discovery of a fundamentally new concept in human relations but the emergence of a political movement universalizing what until then had been largely a local and territorial impulse. This insight helps to explain the speed of change. What is notable for our purposes is the dualistic or two-sided character of the free-air principle. On the one hand, it reflected views about what was proper in human relationships, a sense of the wrongness of enslavement. But on the other hand, it had an exclusivist side, a statement of pride in national identity, coupled with a determination to prevent established relationships from being disrupted by the — Gavin Wright

Born in elevators and supermarkets, Muzak has spread to restaurants, hotels, airplanes, telephone hold services, and waiting rooms. The public-relations experts believe that human beings fear silence - that is, the absence of constantly imposed direction. It is further believed that if we can be relieved of our fears, we will gain enough self-confidence to buy, eat, vote, fly, or simply go on living. — John Ralston Saul

Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the dominion of force is loved but loved sorrowfully because of the threat of destruction that constantly hangs over him. — Simone Weil

Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty. — Barry Lopez

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. — Aberjhani

Trolls have a longstanding animosity for goats
"Who's that trip-tapping across my bridge!?"
and this led me to think that perhaps trolls are related to goats, since it seems a lot more plausible to me that your relatives would make you insane than some random hooved mammal, however ecologically destructive it might be. What if trolls evolved from goats? Or, no, better yet, what if goats evolved from trolls? Or were domesticated from trolls by human shepherds? And the trolls despise their domesticated cousins as a disgrace to the once-proud troll race, (much as I assume wolves would despise Chihuahuas if they ever gave them much thought) and eat them at every opportunity. — Ursula Vernon

In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I've discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations. — Lauren Groff

What we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. There are people we trust because we know their character. Whether they're eloquent or not, whether they have human-relations techniques or not, we trust them and work with them. — Stephen Covey

To seal the deal I employed one of the most powerful tools available to canines riding in cars; it's called the "leanin." No human in the history of dog/owner relations has ever been able to speak negatively of their dog after experiencing it. — Bo Hoefinger

The punch line is 'knock the morale of an employee and organizational productivity is punctured'. — Henrietta Newton Martin

Good human relations not only bring great personal rewards but are essential to the success of any enterprise. — J.R.D. Tata

I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world. — J.M. Coetzee

The role of humankind is to use the cultural and social environment it has created to devise new global values ... Human relations with nature are intimately bound up in interpersonal relations and with the relation of the self and its inner life. — Daisaku Ikeda

There's nothing important on earth, except human beings. There's nothing as important about human beings as their relations to one another ... — Ayn Rand

Can anyone actually find a replacement for a lost loved one?
Isn't there a difference between things and human beings? — Honeya

What a pity, I reflected, that honesty in human relations is so rarely possible. We are compelled to approach, circle and retreat as though performing the steps of a complicated dance, neither trusting the appearance of truth not daring to speak it. — Victoria Clayton

There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a "person"; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions. — Judith Butler

I had always been considered such a nonentity where human relations were concerned that the idea that I might have an influence, even a corrupting influence ... penetrated my heart with a fierce little sting of pleasure. — Louis Auchincloss

It is precisely in that relationship to the Reader that you will find most of the classic faults of style: pretension, condescension, servility, obscurantism, grandiosity, vulgarity, and the like
even academicism. That's why most faults of style can be described in language relevant to human relations. Is your style frank and open ... does it have some understated agenda ... is it out to prove something it does not or cannot admit ... is it trying to impress ... show off ... is it kissing up ... groveling ... maybe just a tad passive-aggressive, with a mumbling half-audible voice that is unwilling to explain ... is it trying to convince ... overwhelm ... help ... seduce ... give pleasure ... inflict pain ... There is no area of the writer's work that is more responsive to the psychology of human connection than style. — Stephen Koch

One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity - the human brain - which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science. — Ivan Pavlov

Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about. — Gore Vidal

As science is more and more subject to grave misuse as well as to use for human benefit it has also become the scientist's responsibility to become aware of the social relations and applications of his subject, and to exert his influence in such a direction as will result in the best applications of the findings in his own and related fields. Thus he must help in educating the public, in the broad sense, and this means first educating himself, not only in science but in regard to the great issues confronting mankind today. — Hermann Joseph Muller

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets
they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away. — May Sarton

Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited
or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society. — Errico Malatesta

Driving in someone elses lane is easy, but remaining in your own seems to be the most challenging self discipline. No matter how big the highway, imagine yours is a singular road traveled in one direction - you're own. — T.F. Hodge

Fo' it be so clear to me now, with my family being black an white, that though we blacks have it very hard fo' very long, we don't own suffering. Abuse, slavery, injustice, an tribulation be part of human living. An if there be a question that be worth axing, rather than it be bout white or black, we might be wanting to ax how come it's always us humans who be suffering an be mean to one another. We might want a be axing that instead. From: Accidents of Birth Trilogy — Christina Carson

Try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves. — Steven Hall

Actually, if you go back to what Marx said in The Communist Manifesto over a hundred years ago, when in talking about the constant revolutions in technology, he ended that paragraph by saying, "All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air, and men and women are forced to face with sober senses our conditions of life and our relations with our kind." We're at that sort of turning point in human history. — Grace Lee Boggs

Near by is an interesting ruin - the meagre remains of an ancient heathen temple - a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days when the simple child of Nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice - in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; — Mark Twain

People who worked with me or knew me still called me the 'world's fastest human' because I almost never stopped. I'd found that I could get more done with no regular job or regular hours at all, but by being on my own, flying to speak here, help with a public relations campaign for some client there, tape my regular jazz radio show one morning at 5:00 a.m. before leaving on a plane for another city or another continent three hours later to preside over a major sporting event. — Jesse Owens

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan