Quotes from Ashley Montagu

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

Every human being is a problem in search of a solution.

The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring.

It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.

One goes through school, college, medical school and one's internship learning little or nothing about goodness but a good deal about success.

Because women live creatively, they rarely experience the need to depict or write about that which to them is a primary experience and which men know only at a second remove. Women create naturally, men create artificially.

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.

The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.

Human communication, 'as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols' it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.

The family is the basis of society. As the family is, so is the society, and it is human beings who make a family-not the quantity of them, but the quality of them.

The world is so full of wonderful things we should all, if we were taught how to appreciate it, be far richer than kings.

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

He who would love his fellow man Must not expect too much of him.

The goal in life is to die young, as late as possible

In our society the elderly are regarded as biodegradable and superfluous, instead of what they really represent: a biological elite who, with weathered wisom, have much to offer the world.

The Good Book" - one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.

The behavioral trait most frequently associated with the long-lived is placidity.

All cultures must be judged in relation to their own history, and all individuals and groups in relation to their cultural history, and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture.

For the person and for the species love is the form of behavior having the highest survival value.

No one should be required to see America for the first time.