Inhumanity

Inhumanity refers to a lack of compassion and the indifferently cruel, sadistic or barbaric behavior it often brings.

• Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth; some of its rivals do. That science is in some respects inhuman may be the secret of its success in alleviating human misery and mitigating human stupidity.
  • Eric Temple Bell, Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1938), page 291.

• "Man's inhumanity to man" is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.
  • Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), Ch. 18: "The Solitary"

• Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.
  • Alexander Berkman in: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Mother Earth publishing association, 1912, p. 299.

• Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
  • Ambrose Bierce in: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, University of Georgia Press, 1 December 2001, p. 130.

• Man's inhumanity to man
  Makes countless thousands mourn!
  • Robert Burns, Man Was Made to Mourn (1786).

• More inhumanity to man, since 1918, has been done in the name of socialism than any other cause.
  • Dick Carpenter (1969)^[1]

• I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.
  • Lord Byron in: Works, Volume 12, John Murray, 1904, p. 457.

• The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.
  • Raymond Chandler, "Great Thought" (19 February 1938), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

• The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.
  • Drew Gilpin Faust in: [http://books.google.com/books?id=0Ng-hNXC1P0C&pg=PR12 This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War], Vintage Books, 2009 , p. 12.

• Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.
  • Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

• Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.
  • Billy Graham in: Edwin Clark Billy Graham, on Satan and Jonestown, The New York Times, 5 December 1978

• Man's inhumanity to man will continue as long as man loves God more than he loves his fellow man.
  • Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto

• Laborin' man an' laborin' woman
  Hev one glory an' one shame;
  Ev'ythin' thet's done inhuman
  Injers all on 'em the same.
  • James Russell Lowell, The Biglow Papers (1848), First Series. No. 1, Stanza 10.

• The world petroleum story is one of the most inhuman known to man: in it, elementary moral and social principles are jeered at. If powerful oil trusts no longer despoil and humiliate our country it is not because these predators have become human, but because we have won a hard-fought battle which has been going on since the beginning of the century.
  • Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, The Shah's Story (1980), page 59.

• There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.”
  • Alan Paton in: Power Verbs for Career Consultants, Coaches, and Mentors, Pearson Education, 2013, p. 126.

• I think the international community should unite to fight such inhuman phenomena as terror attacks and the murder of totally innocent people.
  • Vladimir Putin in: Winter Olympics: Putin cautions gay visitors to Sochi, BBC, 17 January 2014

• Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.
  • Albert Schweitzer, Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1925)

• We have learned to tolerate the facts of war: that men are killed en masse — some twenty million in the Second World War — that whole cities and their inhabitants are annihilated by the atomic bomb, that men are turned into living torches by incendiary bombs. We learn of these things from the radio or newspapers and we judge them according to whether they signify success for the group of peoples to which we belong, or for our enemies. When we do admit to ourselves that such acts are the results of inhuman conduct, our admission is accompanied by the thought that the very fact of war itself leaves us no option but to accept them. In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.
  • Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Lecture: The Problem of Peace (4 November 1954)

• What really matters is that we should all of us realize that we are guilty of inhumanity. The horror of this realization should shake us out of our lethargy so that we can direct our hopes and our intentions to the coming of an era in which war will have no place.
  • Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Lecture: The Problem of Peace (4 November 1954)

• Inhumanum verbum est ultio.
  • Revenge is an inhuman word.
  • Seneca the Younger, De Ira, II. 31.

• The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
  • George Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple, Act II (1901).

• All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome.
  • Kate Sheppard, as quoted in Women, Politics, And Power : A Global Perspective (2007) by Melanie M. Hughes, p. 47

• Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.
  • Andrew Sullivan, "The Abolition of Torture", The New Republic (19 December 2005)

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