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

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

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

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

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Surely the wake left behind by mankind’s forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.

Desire is the essence of a man.

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

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.

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

You can’t trust very many people.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

General consultant to mankind.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

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.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

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.

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

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

In the world today, we humans have become more self-absorbed, more tribal and tenacious in holding on to our narrow agendas; we have become consumed by the barrage of information inundating us; we are even more fickle when it comes to leaders.

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

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

All men are equal before fish.

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

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

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

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

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.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

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.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

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

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

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.

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

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

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.

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.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

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.

Nature is not human hearted.

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

Man becomes his most creative during war.