So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

- Russell Baker

Joseph Baretti

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I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

- Joseph Baretti

John Barth

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Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

- John Barth

Ambrose Bierce

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Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.

- Ambrose Bierce

Occident: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce." These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient.

- Ambrose Bierce

Ocean: A body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.

- Ambrose Bierce

Josh Billings

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Man was created a little lower than the angels, and has been getting lower ever since.

- Josh Billings

Napoleon Bonaparte

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The human race is governed by its imagination.

- Napoleon Bonaparte

Albert Camus

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I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers.

- Albert Camus

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

- Albert Camus

Miguel de Cervantes

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Everyone is as God made him, and often a good deal worse.

- Miguel de Cervantes

Oswald Chambers

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Human nature, if healthy, demands excitement; and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way, it will seek it in the wrong. God never makes bloodless stoics; He makes no passionless saints.

- Oswald Chambers

Malcolm de Chazal

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Monkeys are superior to men in this: When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.

- Malcolm de Chazal

Anton Chekhov

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In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with humans it is the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

- Anton Chekhov

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.

- Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Joseph Conrad

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

- Joseph Conrad

Charles Darwin

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We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

- Charles Darwin

Benjamin Disraeli

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

- Benjamin Disraeli

Albert Einstein

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It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.

- Albert Einstein

Evan Esar

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Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.

- Evan Esar

Martin H. Fischer

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Evolution is individual - devolution is collective.

- Martin H. Fischer

Man embraces in his makeup all the natural orders; he's a squid, a mollusk, a sucker and a buzzard; sometimes he's a cerebrate.

- Martin H. Fischer

We are all parasites; we humans, the greatest.

- Martin H. Fischer

When freedom from want and freedom from fear are achieved, man's remains will be in rigor mortis.

- Martin H. Fischer

Gustave Flaubert

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The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

- Gustave Flaubert

Erich Fromm

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Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

- Erich Fromm

R. Buckminster Fuller

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Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

- R. Buckminster Fuller

W.S. Gilbert

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Man is nature's sole mistake.

- W.S. Gilbert

Stephen Jay Gould

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Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

- Stephen Jay Gould

Alexander Hamilton

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Man - a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

- Alexander Hamilton

William Hazlitt

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Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

- William Hazlitt

Edgar Watson Howe

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The average man's judgment is so poor, he runs a risk every time he uses it.

- Edgar Watson Howe

Thomas Henry Huxley

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The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

- Thomas Henry Huxley

Aldous Huxley

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Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

- Aldous Huxley

William Ralph Inge

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Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.

- William Ralph Inge

Samuel Johnson

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As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.

- Samuel Johnson

Immanuel Kant

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Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors.

- Immanuel Kant

Barbara Kingsolver

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We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

- Barbara Kingsolver

Arthur Koestler

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In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.

- Arthur Koestler

The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.

- Arthur Koestler

D.H. Lawrence

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Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

- D.H. Lawrence

Niccolo Machiavelli

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It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.

- Niccolo Machiavelli

Don Marquis

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The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.

- Don Marquis

Mignon McLaughlin

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Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart.

- Mignon McLaughlin

God doesn't measure His bounty, but oh how we do!

- Mignon McLaughlin

God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world with factory rejects.

- Mignon McLaughlin

People are like birds: on the wing, all beautiful; up close, all beady little eyes.

- Mignon McLaughlin

Christopher Morley

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A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

- Christopher Morley

Plato

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Man - a being in search of meaning.

- Plato

Antonio Porchia

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God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man.

- Antonio Porchia

Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the understanding of everything were all inside him.

- Antonio Porchia

That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.

- Antonio Porchia

We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all.

- Antonio Porchia

Bias of Priene

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What is man's greatest bane? His brother man alone.

- Bias of Priene

Turkish Proverb

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Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose.

- Turkish Proverb

Jean Jacques Rousseau

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Nature does not deceive us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

- Jean Jacques Rousseau

Bertrand Russell

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The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

- Bertrand Russell

George Bernard Shaw

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Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

- George Bernard Shaw

Sydney Smith

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Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.

- Sydney Smith

John Steinbeck

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Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

- John Steinbeck

Adlai E. Stevenson

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Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

- Adlai E. Stevenson

Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.

- Adlai E. Stevenson

Rabindranath Tagore

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Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Henry David Thoreau

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I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.

- Henry David Thoreau

Mark Twain

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Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

- Mark Twain

Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.

- Mark Twain

Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah... didn't miss the boat.

- Mark Twain

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

- Mark Twain

Walt Whitman

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I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd. I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition.... Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

- Walt Whitman

Oscar Wilde

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I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated His ability.

- Oscar Wilde

Robert Zend

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There are too many people, and too few human beings.

- Robert Zend