Bryant H. McGill Quotes

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Man is still the greatest miracle and the greatest problem on this earth.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster... what a contradiction, what a prodigy

People try to typecast astronauts as heroic and superhuman. We're only human beings.

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

Humans are capable of so much creativity and goodness and at the same time they are destructive and cruel. (Leta)

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

The world is awful but also the world is beautiful. Human beings are awful, but ultimately human beings are tremendous.

People are concrescences of ambiguity.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

Ultimately we've only got humanity to work with. It's only clay we've got.

There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all human beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded.

Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.