Human Nature Quotes - Page 29

• We are human beings, and this is the part of our human nature, that we don't learn the importance of anything until it's snatched from our hands.

  Malala Yousafzai

  Wisdom, Hands, History

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• I believe the gun has no power because a gun can only kill, but a pen can give life.

  Malala Yousafzai

  Leadership, Wisdom, Believe

  "16-Year-Old Activist Malala Yousafzai Steals The Show At NYC Awards Show" by Jocelyn Noveck, www.businessinsider.com. November 12, 2013.

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• We sometimes feel the shadows have got hold of us, the shadows of evil. But still, it's up to us to fight.

  Dan Totheroh

  Fighting, Evil, Shadow

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• [Wendy] Davis [pursued] higher education, as her campaign website says, with 'the help of academic scholarships, student loans, and state and federal grants.' Now that she is in a high-profile and hotly partisan race, it has come out that she also benefited from the moral and financial support of her second - now ex - husband. In the process, though, behavior we would expect and hardly notice in a man is being portrayed as freakish and problematic in a woman.

  Liza Mundy

  Family, Leadership, Education

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• I think I'm speaking for a bunch of girls when I say that the idea that feminism is completely natural and shouldn't even be something that people find mildly surprising. It's just a part of being a girl in 2013.

  Lorde

  Girl, Reality, Thinking

  "Super Heroine: An Interview With Lorde". Interview with Tavi Gevinson, www.rookiemag.com. January 2, 2014.

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• Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.

  Nicholas D. Kristof

  Education, Money, Reality

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• In some perfect world where human nature is less messy and history less fraught, any and all people who had ever suffered discrimination would find common cause, gathering together under one big anti-bigotry banner.

  Frank Bruni

  People, Perfect, Together

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• With grace and a keen appreciation of human nature, Nicholas Thompson has written a revealing, moving history of the Cold War through two fascinating men.

  Evan Thomas

  Appreciation, War, Moving

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• When riding, ask yourself what will my horse get out of it if I get what I want? Many times, human nature is to take and to not give anything back.

  Buck Brannaman

  Horse, Giving, Riding

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• All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Feet, May, Moments

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• A small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle... Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account; the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure, change the constitution of man, before we can make it otherwise. No institution, not built on the presumptive truth of these maxims can succeed.

  George Washington

  Sacrifice, Men, Views

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• He [God] just seems so man-made to me. There are so many theories, and not everyone can be right. It's human nature to need a religious crutch, and I don't begrudge anyone that. I just don't need one.

  Janeane Garofalo

  Religious, Men, Needs

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• Human nature is so weak that the honest men who have no religion make me fret with their perilous virtue, as rope-dancers with their dangerous equilibrium.

  Francis de Gaston, Chevalier de Levis

  Men, Dancer, Rope

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• Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.

  Arthur Keith

  Momentum, Evolution, Tribalism

  Sir Arthur Keith (1947). “Evolution and Ethics”

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• Though I admire republican principles in theory, yet I am afraid the practice may be too perfect for human nature. We tried a republic last century, and it failed. Let our enemies try next. I hate political experiments.

  Robert Walpole

  Hate, Practice, Perfect

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• We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will, therefore, always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in pursuit of it. No, we are complicated machines; and though we have one main spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometime stop that motion.

  Doug Stanhope

  Spring, Passion, Men

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• Drive Nature from your door with a pitchfork, and she will return again and again.

  Horace

  Doors, Return, Pitchforks

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• Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,--endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Mean, Diversity, Endless

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• War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Hate, War, Fighting

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• There is no such passion in human nature, as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen.

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Humorous, Passion

  Charles Dickens (1850). “The life and adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit: With a frontispiece, from a drawing by Frank Stone”, p.82

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• I have been too long acquainted with human nature to have great regard for human testimony; and a very great degree of probability, supported by various concurrent circumstances, conspiring in one point, will have much greater weight with me, than human testimony upon oath, or even upon honour; both of which I have frequently seen considerably warped by private views.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Truth, Views, Long

  Lord Chesterfield (1998). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.319, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Wrap thyself in the decent veil that the arts or the graces weave for thee, O human nature! It is only the statue of marble whose nakedness the eye can behold without shame and offence!

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Art, Eye, Grace

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• Are you appalled at existing conditions? Don't waste your energy trying to change conditions from without! Change the Human Heart from within.

  William J. H. Boetcker

  Heart, Trying, Energy

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• The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.

  E. M. Forster

  Breathing, People, Goes On

  E.M. Forster (1951). “Two Cheers for Democracy”

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• Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.

  Paul Samuelson

  Suicide, Self, People

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