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It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples.-- Charles Dickens
"Patriotism is an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."-- George Jean Nathan
You humans are all alike.
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
-- George Jean Nathan
To err is human. And stupid.
Is not that the nature of men and women--that the pleasure is in the learning of each other?
"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."-- Stephen Hawking
To err is human, to moo bovine.
"Did I love her? I thought so. But from my new vantage point I realize that love is nothing more than a messy conglomoration of need, desperation, fear of death, insecurity about penis size, and the self-involved, ego-driven need to college other people's hearts." (Human Nature)
Never underestimate the human capacity for cognitive dissonance.
What is the nature of God? His nature is entirely dependent upon the age or culture that has reinvented him.-- Solomon Skink
"Paper has a genius for multiplication that cannot be equalled anywhere else in nature."-- Hugh Keenleyside
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.-- Helen Keller
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease.-- Voltaire
On-line, adj: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer.
"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."-- Ingrid Bergman
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.
"Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God."
"All children are morbid. It is their one saving grace."-- Truman Capote
Love is like pi: natural, irrational and very important.-- Lisa Hoffman
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.-- Robert Bly
"Truman's Law - If you can't convince them, confuse them."-- Harry S. Truman
Every human being is capable of everything, no matter how exalted or depraved. Without twenty years of diligent domestication, it is in our nature to commit genocide, infanticide, and canabillism. And drink beer and howl at the moon.-- Donna Barr ("Desert Peach: the Good Uncle")
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.-- H. D. Thoreau
It's a mistake to underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion.-- Robert Park
"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."-- Mark Twain
"Here's a horrible thought: You know how dumb the average person is? Well, half the human race is even dumber than that..."
"Anger is natural. It's part of the force. You just have to learn to hang out with it."-- Tori Amos
It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.-- Blaise Pascal
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.-- William James
Grasshoppotamus: A creature that can leap to tremendous heights, once.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.-- Harry S. Truman
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great machinery.-- Horace Mann
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.-- Fred Brooks
The unique operations of the (human) brain are the result of natural selection operating through the filter of culture. They have suspended us between the two antipodal ideals of nature and machine, forest and city, the natural and the artifactual, relentlessly seeking, in the words of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, an equilibrium not of this world.-- Edward O. Wilson ("Biophilia")
Human behavior changes only under the impact of new technology
(Paraphrase of Moon's First Law, from Schrodinger's Cat by R.A. Wilson)
"Until you meet an alien intelligence you will not know what it is to be human."
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time."-- George Orwell
"The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it."-- P. B. Medawar
Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature. That's how it should be. Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.-- Douglas Adams
"O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?"-- Dante Alighieri
"In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist."-- Truman Capote
The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of "Ten Best".-- H. Allen Smith
No matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature.-- Steven Wright
"If you are a human being, you might as well face it. You are going to rub a lot of people the wrong way."-- Jane Wagner
The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.-- Lyndon B Johnson
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."-- Thomas Jefferson
"As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss."-- Noam Chomsky
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.-- John Cleese
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become."-- Edward O. Wilson
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-- Albert Einstein
"The most merciful thing in the world...is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."-- H.P. Lovecraft
It's only by NOT taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess.-- Roger Noe
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr
Natural selection won't matter soon, not anywhere as much as conscious selection. We will civilize and alter ourselves to suit our ideas of what we can be. Within one more human lifespan, we will have changed ourselves unrecognizably.-- Greg Bear
Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all--the apathy of human beings.-- Helen Keller
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.-- Neil Gaiman ("The Books of Magic")
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.-- Susan Sontag
"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards."-- Anatole France
The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.-- Gustave Flaubert
"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it."-- Stephen Butler Leacock
The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.-- Edsger Dijkstra
The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.-- Alfred Kinsey
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila."-- Mitch Radcliffe
I think an embryo/fetus/baby becomes a "person" when it is smarter than a non-primate like a dog. By those standards, chimpanzees and gorillas are persons (although somewhat cognitively impaired--kind of like Fundamentalist Christians), but human newborns are not.-- Dave Touretzsky
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.-- Douglas Adams
"All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway."-- Harry S. Truman
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.-- Rich Kulawiec
Feature, n: A surprising property of a program. Occasionally documented. To call a property a feature sometimes means the author did not consider that case, and the program makes an unexpected, though not necessarily wrong response. See BUG. ``That's not a bug, it's a feature!'' A bug can be changed to a feature by documenting it.
To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, your're overdoing it.-- J. Jenkins
"[The] human mind was like a compass. No matter how much you shook it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or later it'd carry on pointing the same way."-- Terry Pratchett (Johnny and the Dead)
While humans are very flexible creatures, we're born with a number of powerful instincts, which are found across all cultures. Chief amongst these are a dislike of snakes, a fear of falling, and a hatred of popup windows.
-- Steve Taylor
Law of Cat Landing:
A cat will always land in the softest place possible; often the mid-section of an unsuspecting, reclining human.
Glossofacilia: A tendency to use very large words to explain very small phenomena. Glossofacilia drives to complexify rather than simplify and is the natural instinct of reactionaries to an age of change.-- Jim Taylor
"Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead."-- Sinclair Lewis
"The BBC is like a sausage machine: whatever you put in one end, you get Dr. Who out the other".-- Neil Gaiman
"Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals."-- Henry Spencer
"I do actually believe in love. I can't say that I'm 100 percent successful in that department, but I think it's one of the few worthwhile human experiences. It's cooler than anything I can think of right now."-- Trent Reznor