Ashley Montagu Quotes

The family is the basis of society. As the family is, so is the society, and it is human beings who make a family-not the quantity of them, but the quality of them.

~ Ashley Montagu

Unfortunately, we-especially in the United States-have become increasingly mechanized, so that today we feel very strongly that if we can take anything out of human hands and especially out of the human heart and put it through a machine, we have made progress. Indeed, we flatter ourselves that we can make machines that think like human beings, while not always pausing to reflect that in the process we have also succeeded in making millions of human beings who can feel and think like machines. It is a sorry reflection.

~ Ashley Montagu

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.

~ Ashley Montagu

The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.

~ Ashley Montagu

Human communication, 'as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols' it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

~ Ashley Montagu

It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.

~ Ashley Montagu

In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.

~ Ashley Montagu

Today while the titular head of the family may still be the father everyone knows that he is little more than chairman at most of the entertainment committee.

~ Ashley Montagu

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

~ Ashley Montagu

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

~ Ashley Montagu

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.

~ Ashley Montagu

One goes through school, college, medical school and one's internship learning little or nothing about goodness but a good deal about success.

~ Ashley Montagu

There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring.

~ Ashley Montagu