Peter Kropotkin Quotes

Humans are born with a hard-wired morality: a sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. I know this claim might sound outlandish, but it's supported now by research in several laboratories.

The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.

A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

If you can sense the corruption in me, it is ... because there's a dose of it in you.

The only things that separates us from the brute, with which we have so much in common, is the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong.

I call that law universal, which is conformable merely to dictates of nature; for there does exist naturally an universal sense of right and wrong, which, in a certain degree, all intuitively divine, even should no intercourse with each other, nor any compact have existed.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.

Everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than one thing. We are born with it.

The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.

They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

everyone knows how to love because we are all born with that gift.

We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.

Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organizers are always good?

I think leadership is both a trained thing and a natural gift.

Age imprints more wrinkles a in the mind, than it does in the face, and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay.

Worship is as natural to the human family as the sing of the sun is to the cosmic order.

Conscience is wiser than science.

I only knew that there was a certain rightness in life--the feeling you got when you did something the way you knew you should.

What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Let nature decide. When a cow is biologically ready to have sex relations, she mates with the nearest well-hung bull. When a flower is ready to scatter its seed, it pollinates. It's the same way throughout nature - except with man, who tries to postpone consummation of his sex drive, unsuccessfully for the most part, for six or eight years after he reaches puberty.