Aristotle Quotes

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.

For millenia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his exitence as a living being in question.

It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.

Speech is what makes man a political being.

Man is ... a political animal.

I am a political animal.

Man is a political animal by nature; he is a scientist by chance or choice; he is a moralist because he is a man.

Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.

A human being is a naturally political [animal].

Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals for the most part governed by the impulse of passion. This is a truth well understood by our adversaries who have practised upon it with no small benefit to their cause. For at the very moment they are eulogizing the reason of men & professing to appeal only to that faculty, they are courting the strongest & most active passion of the human heart - VANITY!

The uniqueness of humans has been claimed on many grounds, but most often because of our tool-making, culture, language, reason and morality. We have them, the other animals don't, and -- so the argument goes -- that's that.

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.

Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.

Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind nor bond of society.

Man is distinguished not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion, from all other animals.

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated.