Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day.

I think we present extreme aspects of human behavior and hopefully get at times, messages across or bring issues to the table or as we so often say, shed light into the dark crevices of human nature.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.

I am obsessed with why people turn out the way they are.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

I've always read in order to figure out people more, and that includes bad people and good people.

Nobody starts out evil - we know that. It's life circumstances that lead them to that.

I learned a lot about human nature. So much, in fact, that human nature will be my specialist subject on 'Mastermind'.

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.