In the past, human society provided encouragement and opportunity for people to extend support to each other, especially in highly stressful situations.
Most people believe, mistakenly, that wealth in a human society has something to do with money, but that's not true. Money is simply a medium of exchange. Prosperity in a human society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems that we create for ourselves.
Art exists for the human species. I think that all of the people who love art, those who teach art, and all of you should burn with the obligation to save the world.
I've had the opportunity to see both sides of the human spirit. I've seen those who will put you down, demean you, brand you, and have a one-track mind of destruction. But I've also seen people who uplift you. I've been on a journey unlike any others.
If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.
But you cannot expect every writer to dwell on human suffering. I think my books do deal with grave issues. People who say they are too positive probably haven't read them.
How do we know that Moses was grown up? Because he went out unto his brethren, and was ready to bear the burdens and share the plight of his people. Maturity is sensitivity to human suffering.
Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.
There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.
Rather than shutting down free speech, we need to broaden it, to make it possible for young people to say even the things we dislike so we can talk them down. And we need politicians to articulate a picture of the future that includes all of us. Not British values but shared human values.
So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values.
People have entire relationships via text message now, but I am not partial to texting. I need context, nuance and the warmth and tone that can only come from a human voice.
I did this movie, 'A Walk Among the Tombstones' - I truly play a horrible, horrible individual in that - and I would occasionally go to the theater and watch what people's responses were, and they would laugh. He makes jokes, and people would respond to him in a human way. Then I've really done my job if I've humanized a really horrible person.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.
For thousands of years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.
Anything that brings people to see Shakespeare is fine by me. He's the great humanist.
In my normal way of doing things, there's a little bit of 'going native' that takes place, where you're in a world long enough, you can't really help but start to see things in a nuanced, more humanistic way. Just because you're with people and you start to, in general, slightly like the people you're with.
If we talk about 'Groundhog Day' as a humanistic text - we only have one life, and there's no punishment or reward afterwards - then the wisdom is, just be kind because that will make you happy and the people around you happy.
I always felt there was a kind of humanistic impulse in my thinking about film as well as a real interest in its formal and aesthetic properties - just this idea that it can bring you into a very intimate encounter with people.
My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.
