Human Misery Quotes

I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.

When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.

Poverty is an open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.

Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery.

Since trifles make the sum of human things, And half our misery from our foibles springs.

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.

Can the pleasure of sweetening our tea with sugar grown by slaves make up for all the misery produced among our fellow creatures, the butchery of the human species by this detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?

You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.

Religion of every kind involves the promise that the misery and futility of existence can be overcome or even transfigured. One might suppose that the possession of such a magnificent formula, combined with the tremendous assurance of a benevolent God, would make a person happy. But such appears not to be the case.: unease and insecurity and rage seem to keep up with blissful certainty, and even to outpace it.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.

They are playing politics at the expense of human misery.

Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts - there is just too much misery and cruelty for that.

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.

Dogs, monkeys, and parrots are a thousand times less miserable than we are.

Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they ... could ... invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—–money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—–the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. ... That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended—–civilizations are built up—–excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few years, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.

My world of human beings had perished. I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people's points of view - these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can't allow them to delude us to the point where we can't recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.

We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.

We the undersigned, senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.