• […] naught prevents a man

  • From living a life even worthy of the gods.

—Lucretius, first century BCFootnote 1

An honest man is the noblest work of God.

—Alexander Pope, 1734

***

Every man is as God has made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615

What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! […] Glory and scum of the universe.

—Blaise Pascal, 1670

As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.

—Samuel Johnson, 1783

What a ridiculous world ours is, as far as it concerns the mind of men.

—Michael Faraday, 1853

The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws.

—Henry Bolingbroke, 1752

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

I have no faith in human perfectibility.

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1850

Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1860

You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.

—Charles Haddon Spurgeon, 1889Footnote 2

Men have never been good, they are not good, and they never will be good.

—Karl Barth, 1948

I am never surprised by bad behavior. I expect it.

—Gore Vidal, 2009

***

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

—Joseph Conrad, 1898

Humankind differs from the animals only by a little, and most people throw that away.

—Confucius, fifth century BC

I am a human, and nothing human is alien to me.Footnote 3

—Terence, ~160 BC

He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.

—Samuel Johnson, 1809

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

—Albert Schweitzer, 1969

Chimpanzees have given me so much. […] What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior.

—Jane Goodall, 2009

The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.

—Dian Fossey, 1985

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.

—Stephen Hawking, 1994

If […] man created the devil, he has created him in his own image.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.

—Karl Kraus, 1976

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.

—Nicolas Chamfort, 1771

Every man who at forty is not a misanthrope, has never liked mankind.

—Nicolas Chamfort, 1780

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

—Bill Watterson, 1989Footnote 4

The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren’t any space aliens. We can’t be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we’re not all there is. If so, we’re in big trouble.

—Ellen DeGeneresFootnote 5

***

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

—Jean Rostand, 1939

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours in the world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

—Omar Bradley, 1948Footnote 6

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

—Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.

—Lewis Mumford, 1944

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.

—Albert Szent-Györgyi, 1962

***

Would you persuade, speak of Interest, not Reason.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1734

Reason is the newest and the rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history.

—Edward Abbey, 1990

Man is a Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. […] In truth, man is incurably foolish.

—Mark Twain, 1939

A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite enquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labor of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.

—Joshua Reynolds, 1784Footnote 7

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions, and conclusions are not always pleasant.

—Helen Keller, 1913

Most people would die sooner than think - in fact, they do so.

—Bertrand Russell, 1925

Every thought is an exception from the general rule that people do not think.

—Paul Valéry, 1941

Human beings are seventy percent water, and with some the rest is collagen.

—Martin MullFootnote 8

Fools have been and always will be the majority of mankind.

—Denis Diderot, 1777

The fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

***

Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1595

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

—H. L. Mencken, 1949

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

—Paul Valéry, 1943

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

—Aldous Huxley, 1950

The world wants to be deceived.

—Sebastian Brant, 1494

How easily are people deceived, how do they like prophets and oracles, what a herd they are!

—Anton Chekhov, 1921

You may fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

—Abraham LincolnFootnote 9

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

—James Thurber, 1939

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

—Edith Sitwell, 1965

Men have always had a greater inclination to close their eyes than to open them, to believe comforting lies rather than discomforting truth.

—Stephen Vizinczey, 1969

Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing ever happened.Footnote 10

—Winston Churchill, 1936

Three things will never be believed - the true, the probable, and the logical.

—John Steinbeck, 1961

The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

—H. L. Mencken, 1922

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.Footnote 11

—Harry S. Truman, 1958

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

—Don Marquis, 1923

***

The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities.

—Niccoló Machiavelli, 1517

Human kind cannot bear much reality.

—T. S. Eliot, 1922

Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.

—Jane Wagner, 1985

Well, I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.

—Mary Chase, 1950Footnote 12

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.

—Garrison Keillor, 1998

Reality is something you rise above.

—Liza Minnelli, 2009

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

—Philip K. Dick, 1978