Quotes About Human nature

God made a mistake when he gave to humans, infected as they are with evil, jurisdiction over Earth. He should have given jurisdiction to animals.

We're just kind of dark as humans, generally.

Human beings will justify anything.

'House Of Cards' with Kevin Spacey - I love how it portrays humans in power as just like the rest of us - but even worse.

Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

Television and the internet may offer anyone and everyone their fifteen minutes of fame; the passions and obsessions that drive human nature, however, remain the same same.

There's so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly becomes any of us, to talk about the rest of us.

I don't know which is more telling about a soul, their laughter or their tears. I suspect the latter, but hope for the former

Inima omului este animalul cel mai impredictibil care bântuie prin lumea cunoscut?.

They all wait impatiently for the blessed cloak of darkness to cover their wretched little deeds, but the sun will not be hurried by the whims of men.

Rioting begets violence begets rioting. I sometimes think the entire human race is comprised of barely restrained animals, avid for any excuse to tear off their masks of civility. And here I am, always trying desperately to keep mine on.

Humans give stuff away all the time, practically tattooing their darkest secrets in neon on their skulls for anyone to see. Perverse fuckers. If they shouldn't think about it, they do. If they should think about it, they don't.

And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get.

There's that word again. Understand. I think, obliquely, that maybe even more than love or food or shelter or sex, what the human animal craves most is for another human being to understand him.

Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.

spädbarnet och stenåldersvilden lever kanske inte bara kvar i somliga, tänkte jag, utan i oss alla, fast mer eller mindre, det är en väsentlig skillnad (s. 60).

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Human nature is such that our happiness depends on reliable, secure, and predictable social relationships, and without them we feel lost.

Society and the individual are thus interdependent. The one owes its existence to the other. Society owes its existence to human nature, and especially to its lack of self-sufficiency; and the individual owes his existence to society, since he is not self-sufficient. But within this relationship of interdependence, the superiority of the state over the individual manifests itself in various ways;

Give people the power of the gods, and they'll eventually run down like wind-up toys for lack of reasons to go on.

Morality, Schlick was convinced, is not tied to self-denial: "It does not come dressed in a nun's habit." Quite the contrary: "Moral behavior springs from pleasure and pain; if one acts nobly, it is because one enjoys doing so…. Values are not dictated from above, but lie within; it is human nature to be good.

Third, nurture human nature. At the heart of twentieth-century economics stands the portrait of rational economic man: he has told us that we are self-interested, isolated, calculating, fixed in taste and dominant over nature—and his portrait has shaped who we have become. But human nature is far richer than this, as early sketches of our new self-portrait reveal: we are social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values and dependent upon the living world.