Quotes about human nature

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species-man-acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

Yes, I learned about monsters on that trip. And I learned about them in these encounters afterward:

First, monsters are real.

Second, they are us.

I was thinking about what I said to you about customs and morals keeping people apart, making them different from one another. People are so much more alike than different. So much more.

They could all know now if they wanted, but they are too embarrassed. Rolth, for three thousand years everyone has tried to find a word to differentiate men from other animals; some of the ancients called him the laughing animal, some the moral animal. Well, I wonder if he isn’t the embarrassed animal.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

[T]he human being is a very complicated contraption and […] they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good[.]

The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought of what he was doing when he did it and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain of what he will do next.

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

The liberating force of technology—the instrumentalization of things—turns into … the instrumentalization of man.

Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. To be sure, the higher culture was always in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted; the higher culture has always been accommodating, while the reality was rarely disturbed by its ideals and its truth. Today's novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.