Quotes About Human nature

To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough

After this whole acting thing is over and done, you eventually have to be human. Some people are never human. It's very weird.

Sometimes I was sad, sometimes happy. Just on and off. Always I felt welcome. It's just, you know, sometimes as a human being, you cannot always be happy. You do good things, you do bad things, people talk.

If you are fearful, a horse will back off. If you are calm and confident, it will come forward. For those who are often flattered or feared, the horse can be a welcome mirror of the best in human nature.

In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.

Human nature doesn't change. When enough people are comfortable enough financially, there is going to be human nature that wants to spend more money on better quality and, to some degree, status symbols as well.

Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

With success comes complacency if you let it happen. It is human nature; there is that urge to think about how well you have done.

That human beings seek their own well-being and that of those close to them is not an especially provocative discovery. What is important is that this universal aspect of human nature persists no matter what economic system is in place; it merely expresses itself in different forms.

The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.

There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.

Of course, it's human nature for people, when they meet me to have some preconceptions about how I look, how I sing, how I behave. I can understand that. And I've realized you can't do anything about human nature except to ignore it.

I don't think anyone can be more of a predator than a human being.

Human nature must have come much nearer perfection than it is now, or will be in many generations, to exclude from such a control prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice.

Humans are animals of habit - they convince themselves they can't change. And that premise is wrong.

Democracy in some ways is a very illogical political system. When you win an election, you have to preserve the institutions that would make it possible for your political enemies to win next time. If you think about it, that's almost antithetical to human nature.

I am fascinated by people's flaws and delusions: all the messy bits of human nature we all try to pretend we don't have.

I think we all have light and dark inside us.

It's easy to point out the evil in other people, but that can be found in all of us. That selfishness, that is something we all have in us. Sometimes you are successful at dealing with it, and sometimes you are not.

No other mammal is as deceitful as the human being.

I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.

Nobody destroys people - people destroy themselves, and it's very, very sad.

Crime makes for great drama and it's interesting because it delves into the darker side of us. Those kind of stories go way back, the detective and the criminal.