Emma Goldman - Charles Dickens - Rab C Nesbitt TV - Richard Dawkins TV - William Shakespeare - Vladimir Lenin - Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words TV - Adam Curtis TV - Friedrich Nietzsche - Floriano Martins - Philip Roth - Star Trek: Voyager TV - Robert S McNamara TV - Blaise Pascal - Steven Pinker - Frank B Kellogg - John Keats - Adam Smith - Noam Chomsky - Henry Ward Beecher - Thomas Paine - Harriet Beecher Stowe - Denis Diderot - David Hume - John Stuart Mill - Alexander Pope - Nayef Al-Rodhan - Matthew Simpson - Xun Zi - Oscar Wilde - Virginia Woolf - Thomas Hardy - Francis Bacon - Anne Frank - Laurence Sterne - John Updike - The Story of Us with Morgan Freeman TV - Somerset Maugham -
Poor human nature – what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays ***** audiobook 6.57.08
Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, Mr Squeers
There’s nothing that destroys your faith more in human nature than meeting some poor bastard who’s as mad as yourself. John Sergeant Meets Rab C Nesbitt, Rab on holiday, BBC 2011
I suspect that religion is simply a parasite on a much older moral sense ... But it is surely far more moral to do good things for their own sake rather than as a way of sucking up to God. Our true sense of right and wrong has nothing to do with religion. I believe there is kindness, charity and generosity in human nature. And I think there is a Darwinian explanation for this. Richard Dawkins, The Root of all Evil? The Virus of Faith, Channel 4 2006
I do lack some part
Of that quick spirit that is in Antony. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar I ii 28
Yet I do fear thy nature.
It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth I v 15-17, Lady Macbeth
The power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the beam of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. William Shakespeare, Othello I iii @325
Is this the noble nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce? ibid. IV i 277
Such a nature,
Tickled with good success, disdains the shadow
Which he treads on at noon. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus I i 259-261, Sicinius
How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature! William Shakespeare, Cymbeline III iii 79, Belarius
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost. William Shakespeare, The Tempest IV i @188, Prospero
Lastly, in the deepest and dimmest recesses of the unconscious, there lurks the nature of man himself. On it, clearly, he will concentrate the supreme effort of his mind and of his creative initiative. Mankind will not have ceased to crawl before God, Tsar and Capital only in order to surrender meekly to dark laws of heredity and blind sexual selection. Man will strive to control his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the height of his conscious mind, and to bring clarity into them; to channel his will-power into his unconscious depths; and in this way he will lift himself into new eminence. Vladimir Lenin
This is where a century of enquiry into human behaviour fought out on the airwaves has brought us. We are undoubtedly products of our biology, and the potential for human failing will always be there. But that doesn’t mean we’re slaves to our nature. The sophistication of the human brain and the ways in which we live together have given us the power to recognise and master our worst impulses. This after all is what being human is all about. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words 1/3: Human, All Too Human, BBC 2011
Although we feel we are free in reality we like the politicians have become the slaves of our own desires. We have forgotten that we can be more than that. That there are other sides to human nature. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, BBC 2002
We like the politicians have become the slaves of our own desires. We have forgotten that we can be more than that. That there are other sides to human nature. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self IV: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
Giving style to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye. Friedrich Nietzsche
There comes a time when all that remains for us to do is to surrender to the idiosyncrasies of our nature. Floriano Martins
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn’t annihilate human nature. Philip Roth, American Pastoral
You can alter our physiology but you cannot change our nature. We will betray you. We are Borg. Star Trek: Voyager s4e2: The Gift, Seven of Nine to Janeway
Lesson #11: You can’t change human nature. Robert S McNamara, The Fog of War, director Errol Morris, music Philip Glass, 2003
Two things control men’s nature: instinct and experience. Blaise Pascal
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. Steven Pinker
It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day. Frank B Kellogg
Scenery is fine – but human nature is finer. John Keats
There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify – so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish. John Keats
To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature. Adam Smith
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful. Noam Chomsky
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it. Noam Chomsky
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature. Noam Chomsky
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? Henry Ward Beecher
Human nature is not of itself vicious. Thomas Paine
Human nature is above all things lazy. Harriet Beecher Stowe
It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it. Denis Diderot
Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected. David Hume
It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion. Anatole France
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty