The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents are their most important role models.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

Children are all foreigners.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was fourteen.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

Juvenile crime is not naturally born in the boy, but is largely due either to the spirit of adventure that is in him, to his own stupidity, or to his lack of discipline, according to the nature of the individual.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

I’m afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit that will become unnecessary.

If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic.

It’s amazing how confused and distracted and misdirected so many people are.

I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one of the things that women have is men.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

Well, I’ll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.