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

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

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

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

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.

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

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.

Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

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

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

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

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

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

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

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

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

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

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

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.

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

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

I don’t think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States; it all depends on whether there is a dialogue, a discussion, or if the prejudices and hatred of people like the extremists and terrorists from the Cuban community, who try to impose their policies, prevail.

It’s human nature to gripe, but I’m going ahead and doing the best I can.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

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.

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

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

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

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

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

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.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

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

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

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

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

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

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.