Theme

Philosophy quotes about humanity

Humanity names both the species and the moral quality of being humane—bridging anthropology and ethics.

Why this theme matters

Philosophers ask what makes humans distinctive, what we owe one another as humans, and how “humanity” can include or exclude.

In the history of philosophy

Confucian ren, Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment rights, and critiques of humanism from various directions keep the theme contested.

Thinkers in this collection

Immanuel Kant , Seneca , Albert Camus , Jean-Paul Sartre , The Doctrine of the Mean , Protagoras , Blaise Pascal , John Locke

Frequently asked questions

What is humanity in philosophy?

It can mean the human species, shared capacities, or the virtue of humane regard for others.

Is human nature fixed?

Debates range from fixed essences to historical and cultural formation of human possibilities.

Where are philosophy quotes about humanity?

Browse this theme and related pages on dignity, society, and ethics.

  1. Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means.
  2. Man is a sacred thing to man.
  3. There are more things to admire in men than to despise.
  4. In choosing himself, man chooses all men.
  5. Sincerity is the Way of Heaven; making oneself sincere is the way of human beings.
  6. Of all things the measure is man.
  7. All our dignity consists, then, in thought.
  8. As far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.
  9. The good is the realization of personality.
  10. There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly.
  11. I am looking for a human being.
  12. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
  13. Man is visibly made to think; that is his whole dignity and his whole merit.
  14. Man is a rope stretched between animal and overman — a rope over an abyss.
  15. Force is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.
  16. The black man is not. Any more than the white man.
  17. Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?
  18. Négritude is the sum of the cultural values of the black world.
  19. Our ambition is to help build a Civilization of the Universal, a rendezvous of giving and receiving among the cultures of the world.
  20. My turn to state an equation: colonization = "thingification."
  21. Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape… No human contact, but relations of domination and submission.
  22. Ubuntu is the root of African philosophy. The be-ing of an African in the universe is inseparably anchored upon ubuntu. … Ubuntu then is the wellspring flowing with African ontology and epistemology.
  23. To be a human being is to affirm one's humanity by recognising the humanity of others and, on that basis, establish humane relations with them.
  24. Ethics is, in the final analysis, the study of ningen — the human person as both individual and social, as “betweenness.”
  25. Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst.
  26. The task of the humane is to promote the benefit of all under Heaven and to eliminate its harm.