Ashley Montagu Quotes

Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

There is a great deal of human nature in man.

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

You can change the circumstances but you can never change man's inner nature.

Innately, there are qualities in human beings that are always repetitive. There are things like love and hate and jealousy that are just going to be there forever.

I've always been interested in how people think, how they react to challenges in their lives - what makes people tick. I've also always been passionate about social issues and causes, and I wanted to make films that addressed important issues in very human terms.

I think those who object to my characterizing man as simple want somehow to retain a deep mystery at his core.

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

It is human nature that rules the world, not governments ...

Are our problems moving faster than our ability to solve them?

The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is illuminate the human condition.

I really like investigating the things that make us human.

I think you have to see the high highs and the low lows to get to the core of what makes us tick as people.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

In a non-supernatural universe, there's just character, and it's humanity and human beings and how they relate to each other.

One of my pleasures is observing people's behavior and pointing out the inconsistencies that we all sort of have at the center of our lives.

Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature.

I think that's the most important part of doing this job, is learning different personality types. I mean, it's kind of like sociology or psychology in a sense. With that, and with every project I do, I think I'm able to pull something away that further makes me understand humanity in a way I didn't before.

We human beings are very dark, strange things.

As time goes by, people get to know you better. They pose problems for you, and you have to come up with solutions.

In [my] life ... I did not understand steam machinery, but I tried to understand that much more complicated piece of mechanism - man.

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

The human heart is a factory of idols...Everyon e of us is, from his mother's womb, expert in inventing idols.

The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction.