Van Morrison Quotes

We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.

Because I am fascinated by people and what makes them behave the way they do. I think it is one of the most fascinating things in the world.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

The principles and passions of men are always the same and lead to the same result, varying only according to the circumstances in which they are placed.

My company is called Talking Monkey, Inc. It's because that's what I think all people are: talking monkeys.

People are dynamic. They change, and soon as there are enough of you, things change [for a whole society].

The more experience and insight I obtain into human nature, the more convinced do I become that the greater portion of a man is purely animal.

People didn't change. they liked what they liked even if they didn't understand why.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

When it comes to people -- don't write about who you know; but what you know of human nature.

For 6,000 years, these rules have been unquestionably right. And yet we break them every day. People feel that something is wrong in life. There is some kind of atmosphere that makes people now turn to other values. They want to contemplate the basic questions of life, and that is probably the real reason for wanting to tell these stories.

I'm a big fan of human dynamics. Nothing fascinates me more than really interesting people and human dynamics.

It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions.

And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people.

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

Small groups have always been the locus of change. What they do, in a sometimes offhand way, is constellate new cultural forms and give birth to the unexpected. Sometimes the talk is the thing, sometimes the feeling. When we risk talking about something we really care about it's infectious. Like any good infection, such talk can produce heat, a fever of intellectual excitement.

The world is divided by two different tribes. The people who are assholes and the people who are not.

Young people of this century, like my son, didn't live through all those things that went on during that period of time, from 1930 to 1950. They're missing that experience. To go from a bicycle to a vehicle that takes somebody to the moon - only we saw this kind of thing.

People, like water, will run downhill, seeking their lowest level unless something interdicts them.

It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then you fшnd out you hardly know them at all.

Sociologically, large groups of people don't generally have massive changes in their belief instantaneously.