Quotes About Human nature

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.

Jealousy, greed, fear. We're all full of these things. But also love and compassion. If you saw a drowning baby, it wouldn't matter if you were wearing a tuxedo on the way to your own wedding. You'd jump in to save him.

I've actually always wanted to be able to read people's minds. My sister did a movie with super-powers and that's the one I would have wanted, so I really lucked out. The negative is that people are really cruel in their own minds, but you can weed out the bad people from the good people, and then just hang out with the good people.

Our bodies and minds evolved and were adapted for hundreds of thousands of years for tasks like climbing a tree and picking apples, or hunting rabbits, or looking for mushrooms in the forest. They were not adapted to the very gruelling work that is involved in field work - ploughing, harvesting, bringing water, digging weeds - things like that.

If you think people are inherently good, you get rid of the police for 24 hours - see what happens.

I try to teach people to make fewer mistakes. But in designing economic policies, we need to take full account of the fact that people are busy, they're absent minded, they're lazy, and that we should try to make things as easy for them as possible.

That some are poorer than others, ever was and ever will be: And that many are naturally querulous and envious, is an Evil as old as the World.

Some people are in positions of power, and when incentives go haywire, we are all human and it's easy to make mistakes. I am not saying everybody is Bernie Madoff.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.

It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

Some of the craziest aspects about 'Weeper' were the things I found out to be true. I mean, true of people.

We are not by nature cruel.

People interest me a lot: why we are kind, why we are cruel, how we learn the difference, what makes us act in ways contrary to those we've been socialized with.

I think being fascinated by others is just who we are; we're curious creatures.

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

A man marries the most gorgeous girl he can find because It's human nature to want the best of anything. If other men admire her he likes that, too. We all work best under competition. After all, no one wants to face an egg beater across the breakfast table... or find a horror movie in his home when he doesn't even own a TV set.

Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

Sometimes the routes leading to feelings of anger are so convoluted and circuitous that it takes enormous skill to discern their original source, or fountainhead. But regardless of the reason for or the source of the anger or the relative ease or complexity in perceiving either the anger or its source - everybody, but everybody, gets angry.

But I think 'Love, Actually' has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant's character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it's about who we really are as a species.