Quotes About Human nature

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that's because we're all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

The divine wisdom which requires a division of labor has sown different abilities and tendencies in human nature and has enabled human beings to carry out the duty of establishing sciences and developing technology. The fulfillment of this duty is obligatory upon humanity as a whole, though not on every individual.

Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you're playing a tender love story that's set in a coffee shop or whether you're in 'The Avengers,' which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.

I'm not a great believer in marriages as an institution, or even in very long term relationships. I'm not sure we're built that way.

'Evil' is quite a blanket term. People aren't the demonic characters we would like them to be sometimes.

Military history is essential to understanding any history and, moreover, is a terrifying and sobering study in the realities of human nature - for yes, to me, such a thing exists, and history indeed proves it.

The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education, or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.

Doing what comes naturally was (and is) no longer the appropriate response in many circumstances that arose in what had become an unnatural environment. It became the major social role of religion to bridge the gap between a human nature developed for one environment and the altered environment in which that nature now had to operate. People had to be persuaded to act unnaturally, as Jesus and other religious prophets would preach.

Eve's Fall symbolizes women's invention of agriculture, which came to be seen as the Original Sin that caused the loss of Paradise. The revolutionary changes in the human environment to which agriculture led required the introduction of the unnatural values Jesus (and other religious prophets) taught to "save" humanity from the disconnect between human nature and the environment that resulted from what is represented by Eve's eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total.

Most of us reject or manipulate our environments to avoid any emotional interaction that would contradict our early conception of reality, and this fact of human nature may be the single most delimiting factor for all psychotherapies

So long as a society remains economically stratified, the challenge of reconciling lifelong monogamy with human nature will be large. Incentives and disincentives (moral and/or legal) may be necessary.

the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

If people are basically selfish -and they are- then asking them to work hard yet earn no more than their unproductive neighbor is asking more than they'll rarely give. But we already know that; communism has failed.

Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

One reasonable reaction to evolutionary psychology is a self-consciousness so acute, and a cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may provide the only relief.

Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.

Recordaba ahora que el cadáver tenía la boca de los pantalones enfangada, la camisa sucia y húmeda y, a pesar de ello, ¿cómo había llegado a hacerse querer por la jovencita que mató? ¿Existía entonces el amor? A pesar de sus dos mujeres y de sus ocho hijos dispersos y de su vida crapulosa de ladrón y estafador, el asesino amaba.

I too believe in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, but it means nothing.

It is the nature of humans that we tend to pass our pain along. As if we could get rid of it by inflicting an equal hurt on someone else.

They were petty and selfish." "They were miserable and hungry and helpless. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was miserable, hungry and helpless who was not also petty and selfish. The situation brings out the worst in everyone.