“It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.”
“There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”
“What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.”
“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.”
“Human nature is not of itself vicious.”
“There is a great deal of human nature in people.”
“It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.”
“My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand.”
“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.”
“Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!”
“Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything -- except his own nature.”
“Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
“The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.”
“Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.”
“There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.”
“The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.”
“Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't --it's human.”
“We are all murderers and prostitutes --no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
“There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify -- so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.”
“I have never, in all my various travels, seen but two sorts of people I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same. The same vices and the same follies have been the fruit of all ages, though sometimes under different names.”