Douglas Brunt Quotes

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

Against human nature one cannot legislate.

Every so often, we pass laws repealing human nature.

Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'

Does our culture have a need for violence? I don't know. I guess it's a personal thing.

We can't legislate human nature.

One of my pleasures is observing people's behavior and pointing out the inconsistencies that we all sort of have at the center of our lives.

Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

As to modesty and decency, if we are simians we have done well, considering: but if we are something else-fallen angels-we have indeed fallen far.

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

Nobody's born evil. I guess that's why we're drawn to violence. We're fascinated by it, but there's a moral in how you examine it.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.

It's human nature to be curious about people, and to be more curious about young people than old people. We want to cheer something on at the same time we want to tear it down. That's just so normal.

Art imitates life. Life imitates high school.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

It's Australian to do such things because, however uncivilised they may seem, it's human to do them.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Man as a pure animal does not exist.

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?

I've never been pigeonholed and I've experienced so many different kinds of skin - what man will do and won't do, what you should do and shouldn't do. This is what's exciting about being an actor; where philosophy majors sit in classrooms or write books about human behavior, we're actually acting them out in front of cameras.