What Does It Mean to Be Human? Quotes

“My earliest recollection of blues is hearing it in Memphis as a kid in the fifties. It came from the black workers in the fields along Cyprus Creek near the dead-end road I lived on with my mother. The emotion I felt in that music wrapped itself around me and touched my heart. It was very comforting. It gave my loneliness and sadness a sweetness. A kind of hope. Their blues expressed how I felt, too. My parents were divorced; I was an only child; I felt alone as my mother worked long and late hours. I was adrift and out of place when blues floated in like a dream and touched my heart. The blues rescued me. That’s when the blues overtook me. Over the years blues have continued to express how I feel as a human being. Now, more than forty years later, as I work as a blues musician, the music I heard as a kid”
― Frederick Franck, What Does It Mean to Be Human?: Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses from Around the World

“The only way to remove permanently the risk of ultimate catastrophe is to abolish war altogether. War must cease to be an admissible social institution. We must learn to resolve our disputes by means other than military confrontation.”
― Frederick Franck, What Does It Mean to Be Human?: Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses from Around the World