The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

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

Man is a universe within himself.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

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

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

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

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.

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

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

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.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

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

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

You can’t move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn’t mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

Nature is not human hearted.

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.

You can’t trust very many people.

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

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

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

Hell is other people.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

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.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

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.

You can say, ‚Well, isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine‘ – well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter, because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

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.

The three most powerful and most apparent means used by Rome to retain her power over the minds of her votaries are Ignorance, Superstition, and Persecution.

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.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

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.

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

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

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

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

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.

I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

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 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.

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.

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.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

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.

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

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.