Quotes About Human nature

Human beings were not, as the eighteenth-century philosophers supposed, wise and virtuous: they were apes.

Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning.

But the nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upo them, tend to acquire a taste for more. Lead us not into temptation, we pray--and with good reason; for when human beings are tempted too enticingly or too long, they generally yield.

That horrible Benito Hoover! And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom.

The story of drug-taking constitutes one of the most curious and also, it seems to me, one of the most significant chapters in the natural history of human beings. Everywhere and at all times, men and women have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the reality of their generally dull and often acutely unpleasant existence. A holiday out of space, out of time, in the eternity of sleep and ecstasy, in the heaven or the limbo of visionary phantasy.

connected with, the sins of pride, envy, chronic anger and an uncharitableness pushed sometimes to the level of active cruelty.

The older revolutionaries sought to change the social environment in the hope (if they were idealists and not mere power seekers) of changing human nature. Then coming revolutionaries will make their assault directly on human nature as they find it, in the minds and bodies of their victims or, if you prefer, their beneficiaries.

descubriera esta isla poblada de seres felices, sencillos, entregados a la vida sana que constituye el estado natural del ser humano, dándole el nombre de la nave en que viajaba.

And, in conclusion, I say that men are hypocrites; they envy one another, they lie, they are inhospitable, cruel.... And yet they rule over us, and will continue to do so ... because it's arranged like that.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Charming people, when not actively shooting one another, a friend had once said, which was so unkind, but, like so many unkind comments, had a grain of truth in it. They did shoot one another and had been doing so for centuries. They did bicker over and brood on long-dead history--or history that should be long dead. The problem with history was that it refused to lie down and die.

this was a consequence of increasing prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring out greed and selfishness.

Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever.

That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations.

Most theories and ideologies claimed to explain the world, or some aspect of it, but did not in any real sense influence the world. Underneath everything, beneath the layers of explanation that we created, beneath all our elaborate protocols, people still did exactly as they wanted to do. In other words, you did not change human nature by inventing a theory of human nature.

That's a bit of philosophy right there. We all want ice cream in this life. That's what we want. And that tells us an awful lot about human nature and the way we feel—which is what philosophy is all about, I would have thought.

You know what they're like. Mma Ramotswe nodded. She did. They were not all bad, of course. But many of them were awful, which somehow eclipsed the better qualities of some of the nice ones. It was very sad.

There's nowt so queer as folk?

When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of universal application, but one which most people knew little or nothing about.

Moral philosophy] also has to bear in mind who we are, our human limitations. It's not just something that one does in armchairs. As she spoke, she thought of her own armchair. The last time she had sat in it, she had drifted off to sleep while watching the news. For a moral philosopher's armchair, she thought, it's somewhat under-used.

That's the way things are, don't you think? It's human nature. We do things for people we know. Everybody does that.

Love is the most selfish of all the passions.