Human Nature Quotes

I wasn't sure which I appreciated less—the insincere concern or the genuine indifference.

~ Arthur Graham

What is perfect, anyway? The absence of perfection and the existence of human nature in place of something we want to do or we don’t want to do, is an excuse, not an exoneration.

~ Allie Burke

I do not think men are good at all. I have seen enough to know that humans are a wicked race from their very birth. Selfishness defines us. Greed and lust motivate us. And even the best man who ever lived would lie to preserve his own life or beliefs. No, mankind is far from being essentially good. It takes exceptional individuals to change the world, to make a difference. Give the average person a choice, and he will make life miserable for others if only it will make his own life easier.

~ Brondt Kamffer

Why do people, when they are wrong, twist the conversation around and place the blame on someone else?

~ Hilary Grossman

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

~ Russell Banks

The day of the week on which the tour took place was known to all workers. All devices in its path ought to have been carefully neutralized or locked, since it was unreasonable to expect human beings to withstand the temptation to handle knobs, keys, handles and pushbuttons.

~ Isaac Asimov

An ugly smile. An ugly soul.

~ George R.r. Martin

Strange, how in all those apocalyptic movies, when their society breaks down into lawlessness and anarchy, Canada is always the haven of safety, the place people want to escape to.

~ Jenifer Mohammed

Truth and untruth weave the seamless web of human nature.

~ William Barrett

Reason has always been obliterated by the sensation of profound solitude, perhaps that is why we replace the aching of isolation with the anguish of abuse.

~ Elyse Draper

While it is absurd to blame Marx for something he did not foresee and certainly would have condemned if he had foreseen it, the distanced between Marx's predicted communist society and the form taken by 'communism' in the twentieth century may in the end be traceable to Marx's misconception of the flexibility of human nature.

~ Peter Singer

We must consider what Miss. Fairfax quits, before we condemn her taste for what she goes to.

~ Jane Austen

She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

We're all so afraid of what everyone around us thinks that we risk ourselves to desperation. It's utterly stupid. It's utterly frightening. But it's utterly human.

~ Fisher Amelie

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done 'heard' bout you just what they hope done happened.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Life wasn't too bad. The trouble with Man was, even while he was having a good time, he didn't appreciate it. Why, thought Milligan, this very moment might be the happiest in me life. The very thought of it made him miserable.

~ Spike Milligan

...the best way to know who we are is often to find out how others see us. This doesn't mean that we should do what others expect us to do, but it helps us to understand ourselves better.

~ Paulo Coelho

Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world

~ Mark Twain

He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man

~ John Le Carré

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

~ John Le Carré

Barbarism is not the inheritance of our prehistory. It is the companion that dogs our every step.

~ Alain Finkielkraut

As if men did not die fast enough, they are ingenious at finding out ways to destroy one another.

~ Matthew Henry

He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.

~ John Le Carré

Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow.

~ Pindar

The voice of human nature is nothing but one prolonged cry.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Who I am is not the same minute to minute or day to day. There are far too many variables for that to ever be true, for me, or for anyone.

~ Dan Pearce

The propensity of Earthlings to get into trouble, and to learn thereby, was the reason my owners agreed to this mad venture – although no one expected such a chain of unusual calamities as befell this ship. Your talents were underrated.

~ David Brin

he knew that men were too complex to be defined by the worst moment in their lives

~ Richard North Patterson

his legacy, if there is one, is that I try to do my best to see people whole, for who they are and what they've been through. especially those who matters to me

~ Richard North Patterson

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

~ Orson Scott Card

Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.

~ Orson Scott Card

a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.

~ Orson Scott Card

And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.

~ Vasily Grossman

You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel

~ Mark Twain

Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was?

~ Orson Scott Card

I consider Anarchism the most beautiful and practical philosophy that has yet been thought of in its application to individual expression and the relation it establishes between the individual and society. Moreover, I am certain that Anarchism is too vital and too close to human nature ever to die. It is my conviction that dictatorship, whether to the right or to the left, can never work--that it never has worked, and that time will prove this again, as it has been proved before. When the failure of modern dictatorship and authoritarian philosophies becomes more apparent and the realization of failure more general, Anarchism will be vindicated. Considered from this point, a recrudescence of Anarchist ideas in the near future is very probable. When this occurs and takes effect, I believe that humanity will at last leave the maze in which it is now lost and will start on the path to sane living and regeneration through freedom.

~ Emma Goldman

No, I mean, this is a problem that most people have. A problem of the human condition. We get ahold of some kind of shorthand in understanding people, and we think it works, and we use it to assess, categorize, and then, very often, dismiss people. It's the basis for stereotyping, profiling, and several other very sorry words that end in i-n-g.

~ Phillip Depoy

...the enduring human need to be remembered.

~ Ben Sherwood

That is the way with all of your kind… It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strain survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.

~ Iain M. Banks