Human Nature

"My appointees to the board of pardons and paroles reflect my no-nonsense approach to crime and punishment. They believe people who commit crimes against innocent Texans should pay the consequences; th…"

"Self-interest is a necessary but hardly a sufficient basis for a decent society."

"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the p…"

"I get more out of life just being myself, by just being a human being. Not by being a rock star, not by being whatever. Sometimes I act like a jerk, but I think people respect me for being myself. Tha…"

"You talk of her mind being unsettled - how the devil could it be otherwise, in her frightful isolation? And that insipid, paltry creature attending her from duty and humanity! From pity and charity. H…"

"We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make …"

"We used to think that Hitler was wicked when he wanted to kill all the Jews, but what Kennedy and Macmillan and others both in the East and in the West pursue policies which will probably lead to kill…"

"Sententiae at The Packard Humanities Institute, Classic Latin Texts"

"The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?"

"An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replie…"

"Anyone who tries to improve the lives of animals invariably comes in for criticism from those who believe such efforts are misplaced in a world of suffering humanity."

"People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no …"

"The irony is that the healthier Western society becomes, the more medicine it craves... Immense pressures are created – by the medical profession, by the media, by the high pressure advertising of pha…"

"An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems …"

"I feel, as time goes on, not that the war has produced fewer evils than I feared at the time, for the conviction grows on me that the evils are unmeasured. As year succeeds year we shall more and more…"

"There is no secret here. I will give my all, as I always have. This way I prove to the people who hired me, and those who support me, how much it means."

"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

"Photography has fulfilled my adventurous side: it is a real trade. I behaved like a thief in every country where I went, in China, in Africa, in America… all things considered, our trade is situated s…"

"I shall have to express a very deep conviction: that until we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is—whether its victim is human or animal—we cannot expect things to be much better in the wo…"

"It has been among the visions of some dreaming philosophers that human life is capable of almost indefinite extension. The great Condorcet was one of these. He thought that by the removal of the two c…"