Colin Wilson Quotes

Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.

My basic philosophy is that no human being is a saint.

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

Mencius said that human nature is good. I disagree with that.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

The first line in the first 'Gasland' is: 'I'm not a pessimist. I've always had a great deal of faith in people that we won't succumb to frenzy or rage or greed. That we'll figure out a solution without destroying the things that we love.' I have not lost that sense.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

...no bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

Bestow rewards, erect statues, confer even titles so that they be personal alone; but never bind the crown of merit on the brow of sloth.

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes — openly bad and secretly bad.

We're such a funky species. We're so violent, so greedy - this is how we roll. But what are we going to do about it? How do we move forward given who we are? Because situations don't come out of nothing. They come out of certain conditions.

There's a lot to be said for misanthropy.

I think the problem we have as apes is we're asking far bigger questions than we could possibly process.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

And one more thing: you still believe that man can be good. If that weren't the case, you wouldn't have invented all this nonsense to convince yourself otherwise.

One cannot avoid a certain feeling of disgust, when one observes the actions of man displayed on the great stage of the world. Wisdom is manifested by individuals here and there; but the web of human history as a whole appears to be woven from folly and childish vanity, often, too, from puerile wickedness and love of destruction: with the result that at the end one is puzzled to know what idea to form of our species which prides itself so much on its advantages.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

Men from children nothing differ.

Our continual desire for praise ought to convince us of our mortality, if nothing else will.

People, generally, suck.