Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal.

Man is still a savage to the extent that he has little respect for anything that cannot hurt him.

Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.

It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.

Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.

Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely.

I've never met anyone who is seriously bad.

We have beastly qualities within us. If we're put into certain circumstances, and the walls around us come in tighter and tighter, we all could maybe do dangerous things.

There is a capacity for violence we all harbour, and under certain circumstances, it comes out.

People are animals, man.

Evil will always exist in this world.

Once you cross that social conditioning threshold that holds us back, we all become animals. Instantly.

There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.

We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.

Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.

For once you must try not to shirk the facts: mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.

[Men's] natural tendencies, natural proclivities, are bad. You gotta rein that in. You gotta dial that back. You need to really raise your conscience level and be aware of how others see you and dial it back, because it's just too predatory, brutish, what have you.

The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.

He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.

Do you think... that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?

Since we're keeping it primal, you smell good," he observed. "It's called a shower...," I began automatically, then trailed off. My memory snagged, taken aback by a compelling and forceful sense of undue familiarity. "Soap, shampoo, hot water," I added, almost as an afterthought. "Naked. I know the drill," Jev said, something unreadeble passing over his eyes.