ASHLEY MONTAGU

One goes through school, college, medical school and one's internship learning little or nothing about goodness but a good deal about success.

There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.

By virtue of being born to humanity, every human being has a right to the development and fulfillment of his potentialities as a human being.

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

The cultured man is an artist, an artist in humanity.

The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality.

It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

Girls marry for love. Boys marry because of a chronic irritation that causes them to gravitate in the direction of objects with certain curvilinear properties.

Nearly everywhere there is crushing poverty, religious and ethnic enmity, and exploitation of people, other species, and the earth. Sometimes it may even seem that we have passed the point of no return -- that we cannot limit population, harmonize differences, and decontaminate the planet in time. But in a time of crisis, the only philosophically tenable position for a pessimist is optimism.

The modern conception of 'race' owes its widespread diffusion to the white man. Wherever he has gone, he has carried it with him. ... This is not to say that discrimination against (personal) groups on the basis of skin color or difference did not exist in the ancient world; there is plenty of evidence that it did. But it is to say that such views never became the officially established doctrine, upon any large scale, of any ancient society. ...

The creationists repeatedly assert that evolution is a theory, and, indeed, not a scientific theory at all because it is unable to predict future developments. Both statements are untrue. Evolution [phenomenon] is a fact, not theory. It once was a theory but today, as a consequence of observation and testing it is probably the best authenticated actu- ality known to science. There are theories concerning the mechanisms of evolution but no competent student doubts the reality of evolution

We can't solve any problem without first solving the problem of human nature

You show me a murderer, and I'll show you a person who's been failed in the supreme need for love, who never learned how to love, and will hate

The whole of life is a journey toward youthful old age, toward self-contemplation, love, gaiety, and, in a fundamental sense, the most gratifying time of our lives. . . . "Old age" should be a harvest time when the riches of life are reaped and enjoyed, while it continues to be a special period for self-development and expansion.

The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don't read what they write, don't ask what they believe, just observe what they do.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.

The way I change my life is to act as if I am the person I really want to be.

The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.