Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

The mob is the mother of tyrants.

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.

Although I don’t have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

There is plenty of building material and more than enough manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand years will have gone by, and the problem will remain the same.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

As a global society, we do not have to agree, endorse or condone the lifestyle choices of others. However, history has taught us that we equally cannot and should not excuse those who would hide behind religion or misuse God’s word to justify bigotry and persecution.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

I believe the home and marriage is the foundation of our society and must be protected.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

Judas betrayed Jesus. Lady Red betrayed John Dillinger. Those things happen.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Fear is the mother of morality.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.

I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.

Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

If you’re not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

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.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.