Richard Flanagan Quotes

Peoples are made of hate and of love, and more of hate than love.

Every human being is a mixture of light and darkness, trust and fear, love and hate.

Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

We would all love to walk up to someone and shoot them in the head, there's no doubt about that. We're too civilised to admit it, but we're happy to read about it.

People, man, they love hurting people. It's not even fair.

There's monsters in all of us, but there's also vulnerability.

You show me a murderer, and I'll show you a person who's been failed in the supreme need for love, who never learned how to love, and will hate

Principally, I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartedly love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth …

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.

Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.

Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions--tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?... If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece--must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?

And where love ends, hate begins

In every one of us there are good seeds and bad. We have the seed of brotherhood, love, compassion, insight. But we have also the seed of anger, hate, dissent.

Human nature seems to me like the Alps. The depths are profound, black as night, and terrifying, but the heights are equally real, uplifted in the sunshine.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.

The human heart is a dark forest.

There was much to hate in this world and too much to love.

Like most hearts, it was complicated, shaded with dark and dappled with light.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.