Uta Hagen Quotes

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

The events of future history ... will be of the same nature—–or nearly so—–as the history of the past, so long as men are men.

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.

The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.

It's nice to know there are some things in early 21st-century post-industrial culture that don't change very fast. I am one of those.

It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

I recently reread an article of mine written in 1964, and I think it is still valid. There is not much difference. Many of the items on the agenda 37 years ago are still there.

She stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.

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.

If we compare the present time with former ages, we find that the same tendencies and desires have at all times governed states and peoples.

Man is a recording animal.

It is impossible to understand change without context.

The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough.

Nothing is forever, but history is forever.

Presidents come and go. History comes and goes, but principles endure.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

A human being tends to believe that the mood of the moment, be it troubled or blithe, peaceful or stormy, is the true, native, and permanent tenor of his existence.

The worst of faces still is human.