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

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

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

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

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

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

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!‘

Shall I, that have destroyed my Preservers, return home?

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

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.

I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!

Israel is following policies which maximise its security threats… policies which choose expansion over security… policies which lead to their moral degradation, their isolation, their delegitimation, as they call it now, and very likely ultimate destruction. That’s not impossible.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

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.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

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

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Hatreds not vowed and concealed are to be feared more than those openly declared.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

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.

Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

Herb is the healing of a nation, alcohol is the destruction.

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

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

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

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

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

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

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

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.

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.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

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

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

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.

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