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

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

All men are equal before fish.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

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.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

Desire is the essence of a man.

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.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

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

To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

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

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

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.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

You can’t trust very many people.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.

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.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

The same ambition can destroy or save, and make a patriot as it makes a knave.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

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.

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.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.

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

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

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

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.

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.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

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

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

The flesh, or human nature, is generally lazy and self-centered.

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

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

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

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.

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.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

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