This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom - we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

I am mortal born to love and to suffer.

I am a man nothing human is alien to me.

Few men are of one plain decided colour most are mixed shaded and blended and vary as much from different situations as changeable silks do from different lights.

I often marvel how it is that though each man loves himself beyond all else he should yet value his own opinion of himself less than that of others.

It is more comfortable to feel that we are a slight improvement on a monkey than such a fallin' off fr'm th' angels.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

Man is at the bottom an animal midway a citizen and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors and a misfit from the start.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

Man as we know him is a poor creature but he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.

Mankind is an unco squad And muckle he may grieve thee.

Many people believe they are attracted by God or by Nature when they are only repelled by Man.

Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

The cultivated man wise to know and bold to perform is the end to which nature works.

The middle class prefers comfort to pleasure convenience to liberty and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I my lords am on the side of the angels.

There are 193 living species of monkeys and apes. 192 of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo Sapiens.

We fancy men are individuals so are pumpkins but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.

We should expect the best and the worst from mankind as from the weather.

Whosoever would be a man must be a non-conformist.

Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself: and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.

The race of man while sheep in credulity are wolves for conformity.

Men are cruel but man is kind.

In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.

I believe I've found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.

A human being isn't an orchid he must draw something from the soil he grows in.

He was a man take him for all in all I shall not look upon his like again.

The strongest human instinct is to impart information the second strongest is to resist it.

Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

God made him and therefore let him pass for a man.

Darwinian Man though well-behaved At best is only a monkey shaved!

Each man is his own absolute lawgiver and dispenser of glory or gloom to himself the maker of his life his reward his punishment.

Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed the only animal that is never satisfied.

Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

People are too durable that's their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves they last too long.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

A man is a kind of inverted thermometer the bulb uppermost and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.

Man's most valuable trait Is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

The natural man has only two primal passions: to get and to beget.

A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics chemistry or animal behaviour.

The forgotten man. He is the clean quiet virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of outside his little circle. ... He works he votes generally he prays but his chief business in life is to pay.

Limited in his nature infinite in his desires man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.

Man is a make-believe animal - he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither ripeness is all.

Every man in the world is better than someolne else and not as good as someone else.

The voice is a second signature.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.

Know then thyself presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man.

Man an animal that makes bargains.

Man will ever stand in need of man.

We are members one of another.

Man is only a reed the weakest thing in nature but he is a thinking reed.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran And much it grieved my heart to think What Man has made of Man.

Admire exult despise laugh weep - for here There is such matter for all feelings: - Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.

If heaven made him earth can find some use for him.

Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws and obey them space will treat you kindly. And don't tell me man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go - and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: 'There is very little difference between one man and another but what there is is very important.'

One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.

The Family of Man is more than three billion strong. It lives in more than one hundred nations. Most of its members are not white. Most of them are not Christians. Most of them know nothing about free enterprise or due process of law or the Australian ballot.

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

That man is an aggressive creature will hardly be disputed. With the exception of certain rodents no other vertebrate habitually destroys members of its own species.

Every man is more than just himself he also represents the unique the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect only once in this way and never again.

Man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other.

Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.

We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas.

For seasons and seasons and seasons all our movement has been going against our self a journey into our killer's desire.

I am a member of the rabble in good standing.

To be reborn is a constantly recurring human need.

Man is a wanting animal - as soon as one of his needs is satisfied another appears in its place. This process is unending. It continues from birth to death.

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaningless-ness.

Man is an abyss and I turn giddy when I look down into it.