Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
I believe that the writers of Genesis had detected the inherent selfishness in human nature that I propose is in our genes, and invented the myth of original sin to account for it. It’s an image. I am not acting as an exegete – I don’t interpret scripture.
The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training.
If you are fearful, a horse will back off. If you are calm and confident, it will come forward. For those who are often flattered or feared, the horse can be a welcome mirror of the best in human nature.
When I do look at myself, I see someone who is fundamentally optimistic. Quite a lot of what I do in my television work involves the less than pleasant aspects of human nature, yet I’m never pessimistic.
Human nature is above all things lazy.
Ponzi and all of his successors tap into a fundamental part of human nature. One part of our brain tells us this is too good to be true. The other side tells us this is too good to miss. The key to any con is getting a mark to tip to the too-good-to-miss side.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer’s own weaknesses reflected back from others.
All my work is always that exploration of human nature.
I say that human nature is the original beginning and the raw material, and deliberate effort is what makes it patterned, ordered, and exalted.
Communism brought out the worst in human nature and crippled people’s ability or ambition to participate in a market economy.
With these vast advantages, ordinary and extraordinary, one would have supposed the North would have been content, and would have at least respected the security and tranquility of such obedient and profitable brethren; but such is not human nature.
I think it’s a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you’ll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.
Human nature being what it is, people don’t want to acknowledge that a problem exists when they know they have 35 other problems to deal with.
I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.
You sit up there, and you see the whole gamut of human nature. Even if the case being argued involves only a little fellow and $50, it involves justice. That’s what is important.
Nothing in human nature is so God-like as the disposition to do good to our fellow-creatures.
English majors understand human nature better than economists do.
It’s human nature for everyone to say ‘what if,’ but I try to snap out of it as quickly as I can because I’m never going to be able to go back and change what has happened.
Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
I thought this was the most incredible opportunity. Because ‘Planet Of The Apes,’ aside from the fantasy element of talking apes, is such an amazing franchise, because under the surface of that genre, you’re actually looking at human nature.
War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.
If there were no human nature, then there would be nothing for deliberate effort to be applied to. If there were no deliberate effort, then human nature would not be able to beautify itself.
You see in moments of duress not only the darkest parts of human nature but also the brightest, the most noble.
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.
It is human nature to instinctively rebel at obscurity or ordinariness.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman’s paintings to Mozart’s symphonies and Einstein’s view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.
Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for life is never so low or so little as when occupied with the present.
I’m more into human nature than politics. But they’re intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.
We imagine that human nature doesn’t change. We like to say that but I don’t think it’s true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.
I first read ‘Lord of the Flies’ as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature.
Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.
Human nature is such that monogamy is a really hard thing to achieve.
The parental, and filial affections seem to be as ardent, their sensibility and attachment, as active and faithful, as those observed to be in human nature.
In the days of Gary Cooper, James Stewart etc, film stars personified the better aspects of human nature.
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.
I think… the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
I think it’s human nature that if we don’t have our own family, we will create a family, because it’s human nature, and it’s that element of trust and dependency and love and all of those sort of things.
It is human nature to hate the man whom you have hurt.
I think it’s in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you.
The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.
In the ancient world and, above all, among the Greeks, human nature was held in high esteem.
It’s kind of part of human nature to want to know the truth or want to be in on the secret. For stories that focus in on that – like whodunits – it’s easy to get drawn into.
No man can see God in this life and live because His glory would annihilate our poor, weak human nature.
It is part of our human nature to want to be liked. It is part of our human nature to worry about what others think of us. It is an attribute of greatness and of American exceptionalism to not surrender to our nature, but to be guided by an inner calling to persevere and to prevail, no matter the personal cost.
Everything happens for a reason. Like, I kind of hear people go, ‘Man, you’ve been in a lot of bands.’ Yes, I have. I’ve also been married several times, too, and every time I get into something, I think, ‘This is the one.’ I think that’s just human nature.
I guess it’s human nature, as every group breaks into factions, yet at a time when we are trying to be taken seriously, it can confuse people – especially when it moves from being about where you want to go and what you want to do to why the others are idiots.
For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity.
In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’ based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution.
I see my responsibility as to give people something they want to keep turning the pages of and giving people something to chew on, looking at some aspect of human nature that hadn’t occurred to them recently.
