humanity

The function and duty of a human being. — The function and duty of a human being, a “quality” human being, that is, is the sincere and honest development of potential and self-actualization. One additional comment: the energy from within and the physical strength from your body can guide you toward accomplishing your purpose in life — and to actually act on actualizing your duty to yourself.

Bruce Lee

… the thought that our dead parents or friends would have approved our conduct is scarcely less powerful motive than the knowledge that our living ones do approve it; and the idea that Socrates, or Howard, or Washington, or Antonius or Christ would have sympathized with us, or that we are attempting to do our part in the spirit in which they did theirs, has operated on the very best minds as strong incentive to act up to their highest feelings and convictions.

John Stuart Mill

When you have had a glimpse of such disaster as this – and however it ends the Spain war will turn out to gave been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and physical suffering – the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously the whole experience had left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.

George Orwell

Through defeats and disasters, humanity searches for the elixir of youth; that is, of life made into thought, the ardor that upholds belief in the wider usefulness of our individual effort, even if it apparently changes nothing in the iron working of the world… By choosing, we had to give up some values for the sake of others, which is the essence of tragedy. Yet only such an experience can whet our understanding, so that we see an old truth in a new light: when ambition counsels us to lift ourselves above simple moral rules guarded by the poor in spirit, rather than to choose them as our compass needle amid the uncertainties of change, we stifle the only thing that can redeem our follies and mistakes: love.

Czesław Miłosz

But when I compare us with the inhabitants of calm and orderly countries, I would be inclined, in spite of all our misfortunes and sufferings, to call us happier in one respect. Neither new models of cars, nor travels, nor love affairs provide the elixir of youth. In grabbing our portion of amusements and pleasures, we expose ourselves to the vengeance of time, which dulls receptivity… That miraculous elixir is nothing other than the certainty that there are no boundaries to the knowledge of what is human; that to puff ourselves with self-importance is inappropriate because each of our achievements falls away into yesterday, and we are always pupils in an introductory class.

Czesław Miłosz

…in democratic conditions … it’s important that politics be more than just a technology of power, but that it provides a genuine service to citizens, a service that is as disinterested as possible, based on certain ideals, a service that follows the moral order that stands above us, that takes into account the long-term interest of human race and not just what appeals to the public at any given moment … That doesn’t mean that politics must surrender all its ideals, deny its “heart”, and become a mere self-propelled, technocratic process…

Václav Havel