Leonard Nimoy Quotes

Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.

I find human behavior really interesting. I think that's ultimately what being an actor is. You explore what it means to be human.

The kind of loving women and men have in them and the ways it comes out from them makes for them the bottom nature in them, gives to them their kind of thinking, makes the character they have all their living in them, makes them then their kind of women and men and there are always many millions made of each kind of them.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.

People can be unimaginably foolish...and they can be unimaginably grand, at times.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

A lot of times the movies I think are the funniest are dramas. I feel like dramas are so much funnier because they're actually capturing human beings. Humans are so weird and clumsy, and that, to me, often makes me laugh more.

I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

The best movies are made from a point of view of an understanding of human nature and an understanding of history and an understanding of what motivates people, of what makes a good movie from an emotional place.

It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.

The student of politics therefore as well as the psychologist must study the nature of the soul.

I think people's relationship with the concept of violence changes, and that to me might be a little more interesting.

I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.

There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not perfect. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that's the novelists' materials. That's where they have to go. And a lot of that just isn't pretty. We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.

I think this is interesting, us human creatures are capable of love, and it's a very powerful emotion. It also can go awfully wrong.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.

I think that as human beings, we quite naturally take for granted what is similar among human beings and, then, pay attention to what differentiates us. That makes perfect sense for us as human beings.

We're all the same, we all think its better somewhere else; its better being older if you're younger - or its better being younger when we're older.

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

Everybody's a multifaceted, emotional, living being, I think. Sometimes it's fun to goof around, sometimes you've got to think about things, sometimes you've got to be strange, and then you've got to be jiggly. That's just what being a human's all about.

People's lives are forever controlled by two emotions: fear and greed.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

Will there be a time when equality will exist? I think given human nature there will always be conflict.

Of all the creatures that creep, swim, or fly, Peopling the earth, the waters, and the sky, From Rome to Iceland, Paris to Japan, I really think the greatest fool is man.