Sourced and curated.

All men by nature desire to know.

Aristotle

Metaphysics · 322 BC

★ 9.2

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

Politics · 350 BC

★ 8.7

Scientific literature

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Charles Darwin

The Descent of Man · 1871

★ 8.5

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Genesis 1:26-27

1405 BC

★ 8.4

Poem · Epic poem

All men have need of the Gods.

Homer

The Odyssey · 700 BC

★ 8.3

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman

Song of Myself · 1855

★ 8.0

How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be!

Lord Byron

Don Juan · 1824

★ 7.5

Personal journal

It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals. They seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

Anne Frank

The Diary of a Young Girl · 1944

★ 7.4

Play · Tragedy (play)

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals-And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

William Shakespeare

Hamlet · 1616

★ 7.3

Essay · Philosophical literature

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

Immanuel Kant

1784

★ 7.1

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Albert Camus

The Rebel · 1951

★ 7.1

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them.

Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights · 1847

★ 7.1

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

Alexander Hamilton

Federalist 15 · 1787

★ 7.1

For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes.

Francis Bacon

Novum Organum · 1620

★ 7.0

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

1st John 1:8

★ 7.0

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

James Madison

Federalist 51 · 1788

★ 7.0

Film · Drama (film) · Drama

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Gordon Gekko

Wall Street · 1987

★ 6.9

Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasions for it.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Discourses on Livy · 1531

★ 6.2

Film · Psychological drama (film) · War (film) · Psychological drama · War

In this war, things get confused out there. Power, ideals, the old morality, practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God. 'Cause there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil, and good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have one. Walt Kurtz has reached his and very obviously, he has gone insane.

General R. Corman

Apocalypse Now · 1979

★ 6.0

Personal journal

If all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.

Abraham Lincoln

1854

★ 5.5

Essay · Philosophical literature

As long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Aldous Huxley

1937

★ 5.2

Essay · Magazine

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley

1956

★ 5.2

Speech

It is useful to distinguish among four factors which give importance, urgency, and inevitability to the advancement of space technology. The first of these factors is the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.

James R. Killian

1958

★ 5.0

Poem · Epic poem

We are quick to flare up, we races of men on the earth.

Homer

The Odyssey · 700 BC

★ 5.0

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Genesis 6:5

1405 BC

★ 4.6

Historical literature · Autobiography and memoir

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

Julius Caesar

The Gallic Wars · 49 BC

★ 4.0

Religious literature

The weakness of little children's limbs is innocent, not their souls.

St. Augustine

Confessions · 400

★ 4.0

Treatise · Political literature · Philosophical literature

So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honour, they are satisfied.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The Prince · 1532

★ 4.0

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist · 1837

★ 4.0

Travel writing

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

Mark Twain

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

Film · Action (film) · Science fiction (film) · Action · Science fiction

It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

The Terminator

Terminator 2: Judgment Day · 1991

★ 4.0

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Aristotle

The Nicomachean Ethics · 322 BC

★ 3.9

I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan · 1651

★ 3.9

Essay

The heart of man is made to reconcile contradictions.

David Hume

1741

★ 3.9

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

James Madison

Federalist 55 · 1788

★ 3.9

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

Mark Twain

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1893

★ 3.9

Novel · Dystopian fiction

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

The tendency of man's nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards.

Mencius

300 BC

★ 3.8

Biography

It is part of human nature to hate the man you have hurt.

Tacitus

★ 3.8

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

Honore de Balzac

La Comedie humaine · 1842

★ 3.8

Novel · Coming of age story

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography · 1847

★ 3.8

Speech · Political speech

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature—opposition to it, is [in?] his love of justice.

Abraham Lincoln

1854

★ 3.8

Novella · Science fiction

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde · 1886

★ 3.8

Short story

Everything has its limit—iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

Mark Twain

1906

★ 3.8

Novel · Post-colonial literature

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to.

Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things · 1997

★ 3.8

Play · Tragic play · Greek theater

Neither anarchy nor tyranny—this I counsel my citizens to support and respect, and not to drive fear wholly out of the city. For who among mortals, if he fears nothing, is righteous?

Aeschylus

The Eumenides · 458 BC

★ 3.7

Historical literature

If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.

Herodotus

Histories · 430 BC

★ 3.7

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Niccolo Machiavelli

1531

★ 3.7

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.

Adam Smith

The Theory of Moral Sentiments · 1759

★ 3.7

Novel · Satire

Do you believe that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?

Voltaire

Candide · 1759

★ 3.7

So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

James Madison

Federalist 10 · 1787

★ 3.7

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot

1872

★ 3.7

Human kind Cannot bear very much reality.

T.S. Eliot

Burnt Norton · 1936

★ 3.7

Speech · Political speech

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the Middle Ages. It was written in Magna Charta.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Third Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1941

★ 3.7

Novel · Western literature

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery.

Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness in the West · 1985

★ 3.7

Film · Superhero (film) · Superhero

Mankind was not evil, just...uninformed.

Professor Charles Xavier

X-Men · 2000

★ 3.7

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Psalm 51:5

450 BC

★ 3.6

Nature has left this Tincture in the Blood, That all Men wou'd be Tyrants if they cou'd.

Daniel Defoe

1701

★ 3.6

That which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred Tennyson

Poems · 1842

★ 3.6

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

Anatole France

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard · 1881

★ 3.6

A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad

Under Western Eyes · 1911

★ 3.6

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

W.H. Auden

1939

★ 3.6

Psychological literature

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.

Carl Jung

1958

★ 3.6

Film · Dystopian (film) · Crime (film) · Dystopian · Crime

Goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Prison Governor

A Clockwork Orange · 1971

★ 3.6

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.

Apostle Paul

Romans 3:23 · 56

★ 3.5

Essay

They that deny a God destroy a man's nobility, for certainly man is of a kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.

Francis Bacon

1625

★ 3.5

Autobiography and memoir · Religious literature

There is surely a peece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.

Sir Thomas Browne

1643

★ 3.5

Pamphlet · Political literature

We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy, to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt.

Edmund Burke

1770

★ 3.5

Pamphlet · Political literature

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

Edmund Burke

1770

★ 3.5

Essay · Religious literature

Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either.

G.K. Chesterton

1926

★ 3.5

Psychological literature

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

Carl Jung

1933

★ 3.5

Psychological literature

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

Carl Jung

1944

★ 3.5