Human Nature

"I began gradually to perceive this immense fact, which I really advise every one of you who read history to look out for and read for—if he has not found it—it was that the kings of England all the wa…"

"What man is to be, he must become; and as he is to be a being for himself, must become through himself. Nature completed all her works; only from man did she withdraw her hands, and precisely thereby …"

"Overwhelmingly the British people want us to get on with delivering Brexit and also address the other important issues they care about. I believe it is my duty to deliver on the British people's instr…"

"In addition to the obvious dangers, there is another subtle but by no means minor disadvantage to a pure deterrence posture: the threat of mutual suicide is a very uninspiring concept, no matter how l…"

"Part One... discusses at length the opposing ways of approaching and dealing with life: co-operating or competing. It traces the competitive spirit back to the animal kingdom and shows its gradual rep…"

"As explained in a 1972 interview, his characters "all rush around trying to do their best—trying to live well, within their known or unknown limitations, doing what they can't help doing, ultimately a…"

"It is a terrible and awesome thing when a man sets out to create all other men in his own image. Such became the goal and all consuming ambition of Karl Marx. Not that he would have made each man equa…"

"You Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But now as for what…"

"Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft."

"Do you know that ages will pass and mankind will proclaim in its wisdom and science that there is no crime and, therefore no sin, but that there are only hungry people. "Feed them first and then deman…"

"Can't take sides? — — —! These were American journalists, and they can't take sides? That attitude illustrates the haughty arrogance of people in the news business."

"The tendency to be rational is the consistent and hence predictable element in human behavior."

"All people believe their suffering is greater than others."

"Right now, there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago. Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect, and now, we see each other. We hear each other. We share …"

"The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. ... How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!"

"Before people crow about the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, I suggest they wait a bit."

"We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it."

"It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level."

"The view of human society and personality that informs this argument refuses the consistently disappointing and misleading attempt to distinguish a permanent core and a variable periphery of human nat…"

"What are wanted for the Indian as for the Englishman, the Frenchman, the German, and the Russian, are not Constitutions and Revolutions, nor all sorts of Conferences and Congresses, nor the many ingen…"