Quotes About Human nature

The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible...just bad enough to make it neccessary.

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.

It is the nature of a business community that it deals with the covert forms of power in economic life and to be insensible to the significance and the complexity of more overt forms of power, even as it is insensible to the motive of the lust for power as an element in human nature.

Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.

Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée : car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose, n'ont point coutume d'en désirer plus qu'ils en ont.

El mejor modo de castigar a los humanos, es dándoles lo que tanto reclaman.

My father always said that it is a reasonable expectation of life that no one will go out of his way, against his own interest, to break his word or to hurt another person. And this turns out, not just in obvious cases, for example haters, pathological people and institutions, sadists, but in everyday life itself to be plain untrue. I wonder why. A reasonable expectation of life, I have found, is hardly ever quite borne out.

no religion is inherently violent or peaceful; people are violent or peaceful.

In case you haven't noticed, people aren't nice,

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Much of the church rapidly lost the Reformers' consciousness of the noetic effects of sin, the impact of fallen human nature in darkening the unregenerate mind. Later theologians readily forgot that sin generates an unconscious drive to construct systems of understanding the world which suppress the knowledge of the real God, systems which deform and distort the facts and theories they incorporate.

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.

Within the range of Macdonald's accomplishments, there are sizable gaps. The largest, surely, is that, unlike Lincoln, he never appealed to people's "better angels." He was a doer, not a thinker, although highly intelligent and omnivorously well read. He lacked the certitudes of a moralist, instead taking human nature as he found it and turning it to his purposes.

Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive feature of human life; it characterizes most people in most social categories. When they overestimate their personal immunity from harm, people may fail to take sensible preventive steps. If people are running risks because of unrealistic optimism, they might be able to benefit from a nudge. In fact, we have already mentioned one possibility: if people are reminded of a bad event, they may not continue to be so optimistic.

If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don't have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse's birthday, and have a hangover on New Year's Day. They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens.

Yet historically, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with a mistrust instead of a trust.

You get more misanthropic every day. - I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.

Most people, he concluded, were selfish, greedy, unprincipled, venal, utterly irredeemable shit-eaters, but he'd also observed that these same people were highly sensitive to criticism.

The best she was able to do was to reflect that people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit-and-run posing as democracy in action. Here

The best she was able to do was to reflect that people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit-and-run posing as democracy in action.

Sometimes mortals can be more horrible than monsters.