The older I grow, the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn’t expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.

What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves

Why can't they understand the way we feel? They just don't trust what they can't explain. I know we're different, but deep inside us we're not that different at all.

It is unfortunate that when you want to make some people feel like human beings, they begin to take you as an animal.

It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. ...Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.

To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So, as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual.

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?

"Even if we ourselves are not personally scandalized by the notion of other animals as close relatives, even if our age has accommodated to the idea, the passionate resistance of so many of us, in so many epochs and cultures, and by so many distinguished scholars, must say something important about us. What can we learn about ourselves from an apparent error so widespread, propagated by so many leading philosophers and scientists, both ancient and modern, with such assurance and self-satisfaction?

One of several possible answers: A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. With untroubled consciences, we can render whole species extinct — for our perceived short-term benefit, or even through simple carelessness. Their loss is of little import: Those beings, we tell ourselves, are not like us. An unbridgeable gap gas thus a practical role to play beyond the mere stroking of human egos. Darwin's formulation of this answer was: "Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals.

You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You're like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look —

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character.

It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful.

Let me simply state that it is wrong to regard any other human being, a priori, as an object, or an 'It.' This is so because each and every human being - you, every friend, every stranger, every foreigner - is precious.

We don't see people as they are. We see people as we are.