Quotes about Human nature

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.

It is the nature of a business community that it deals with the covert forms of power in economic life and to be insensible to the significance and the complexity of more overt forms of power, even as it is insensible to the motive of the lust for power as an element in human nature.

Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.

We are human beings, not human doings.

Selfishness is one of the principal fruits of the corruption of human nature; and it is obvious that selfishness disposes us to over-rate our good qualities, and to overlook or extenuate our defects.

What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?

You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn't others. It's ourselves.

The best of men are just men at best.

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

We're all moons. Sometimes our dark sides overshadow our light.

Sometimes I don't like people. And, you know, it doesn't bother me. The hard ones are when you really like somebody, really respect somebody and they make a mistake.