Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

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.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

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

Action is the real measure of intelligence.

It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! Only wolves and tigers seem to have learned to hunt man for food, and perhaps sharks and crocodiles.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

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

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

Desire is the essence of a man.

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.

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

Democracy is a daring concept – a hope that we’ll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

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

I think what it really is, is that I date creative people. And I think that what intimidates them is not my purse; it’s my mind.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

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

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

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

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

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

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

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.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

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.

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

When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states.

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

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

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

On the day-long follows that I used to do with mothers and their offspring – these chimp families that I knew so well – there was hardly a day when I didn’t learn something new about them.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

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.

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.

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

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

What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It’s not an intellectual thing. It’s almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.

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.

They say somebody’s ‚street smart.‘ I feel like, if I got intelligence, it’s just a country smart.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.