Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

There’s very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction – that is, the hatred and the anger – they come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they’re rejected by the U.S. government and by U.S. elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.

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

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

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.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

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.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

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.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

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

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I’m referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

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

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.

Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Nature is not human hearted.

Racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, or hatred of anyone with different beliefs has no place in the human mind or heart.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.

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.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

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.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Hatred is blind, as well as love.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.