Hugh MacLennan Quotes

Human beings, in their natural state, are unpredictable, erratic, and unhappy. It is only once their animal instincts are controlled that they can be responsible, dependable, and content.

Thirst teaches all animals to drink, but drunkenness belongs only to man.

Animals have always left me with a curiosity about human nature. I trust animals more than most people.

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 are just greedy animals, after all.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

The truth is, if a werewolf behaved like this psychopath it wouldn't be because he was part animal, but because he was still too human. Only humans kill for sport.

How we act with each other really reveals our most animal instincts.

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

Freedom within any kind of social structure - the whole issue of exactly what the human animal is - is an ongoing preoccupation of mine. And I certainly don't think I've come to the end of that exploration, and with any luck, I never will. But I'm very curious about exactly what kind of beast we are. We're so complicated.

Animals teach us about the animals in ourselves. We need their spirits.

They that examine into the Nature of Man, abstract from Art and Education, may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company, Good-nature, Pity, Affability, and other Graces of a fair Outside; but that his vilest and most hateful Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and, according to the World, the happiest and most flourishing Societies.

Only passions can raise a man above the level of the animal.

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

It's human nature, we take a mile when we're given an inch. We're crazy. You see what we did to the animals! They don't even exist anymore!

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane.

The animals to whom nature has given the faculty we call cunning know always when to use it, and use it wisely; but when man descends to cunning he blunders and betrays.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

I do think on some basic level we are animals, and by instinct we kind of breed accordingly. But as much as I believe that, I work really hard when I'm in a relationship to make it work in a monogamous way.

Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.