Quotes About Human nature

Love is an irrational force, making humans do all sorts of strange and wonderful things like write poetry and take up the ukulele.

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions.

Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

To solve these problems one needs as much an understanding of politics as an understanding of man - and the one cannot be derived from the other.

The central issue of poetry as of politics is the destiny of the human personality.

It is... a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.

It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program - on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off - than on any positive task.

Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.

Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.

When a man is at peace he is a man, when angry he is an animal.

We don't like security rules and laws, but without them men will be animals, perhaps the most dangerous animals.

Humans are driven by a perpetual and restless desire of power.

All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.

Oh! how amazing it is that people can talk so much about men's power and goodness, when if God did not hold us back every moment, we should be devils incarnate!

People are motivated by the desires for privilege, for power, for profit. Those are not shocking revelations. Anyone who's had any experience in life knows these things.

Something happens to people around fame and power and money - it can bring out the worst and best in people; it's a monster you have to tame.

It's human nature to abuse power, no matter who you are.

Through money or power you cannot solve all problems. The problem in the human heart must be solved first.

Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something--something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of it, that had driven the entire engine, the folly and glory of who we are.

The dialogue, as a form of exposition, has this disadvantage, that it stimulates the pugnacious, or, more politely speaking, the chivalrous instinct in human nature. One of the disputants invariably goes as a lamb to the slaughter, and his pre-arranged massacre cannot but stir our sympathy. Thus a feeling of antagonism to the writer's argument is aroused by the very form. There is a cat-and-mouse cruelty about the Socratic method against which our sense of justice, nay, of humanity, rebels.