Quotes & Sayings About How Humans Are Bad

There are no good or bad people, humans are shaped by culture. — Jacque Fresco

Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. How bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pain of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals. — Peter Singer

Humans are the killers of magic, you see.....People can be cruel, unkind, mean, selfish. We can be a great many dreadful thing, and at one time or another we are all guilty of bad behavior. What we fail to realize is that we are the only ones who can do such things. — Patrick Carman

Animals have this in common with one another: unlike humans they appear to spend every minute of every hour of every day of their lives being themselves. A tree frog (so far as we can ascertain) doesn't wake up in the morning feeling guilty that it was a bad tree frog the night before, nor does it spend any time wishing it were a wallaby or a crane fly. It just gets on with the business of being a tree frog, a job it does supremely well. We humans, well ... we are never content, always guilty, and rarely that good at being what nature asked us to be
Homo sapiens. — Stephen Fry

I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.
And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.
The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless. — Jon Ronson

You're not a bad person. But you sometimes do bad things. You know what that makes you? Human. — David D. Burns

The prospect of a world that contains neither humans nor Z's is not so terrifying. Nature will take its world back. Animals will frolic and fight. There will be no lord of the manor, which is not such a bad thing, because it seems to me that people have done a pretty poor job of guiding the biosphere for the last few thousand years. — John Green

Books understand me, but humans don't understand me. They are bad friends books are forever as well as computer's and Tv and everything else which doesn't have soul. Although that dogs and cats and many other animals are quite interesting friends. — Deyth Banger

Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this feeling that we - individually - are special. A patch of ice or a pea-sized blood clot makes a mockery of that illusion in a heartbeat. We are not special at all. — Michael Perry

Human beings," said the Ship's Confessor, "cannot designate a 'current best candidate' without psychological consequences. Human rationalists learn to discuss an issue as thoroughly as possible before suggesting any solutions. For humans, solutions are sticky in a way that would require detailed cognitive science to explain. We would not be able to search freely through the solution space, but would be helplessly attracted toward the 'current best' point, once we named it. Also, any endorsement whatever of a solution that has negative moral features, will cause a human to feel shame - and 'best candidate' would feel like an endorsement. To avoid feeling that shame, humans must avoid saying which of two bad alternatives is better than the other. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

After a moment, Wrath turned to John. "This is Lassiter, the fallen angel. One of the last times he was here on earth, there was a plague in central Europe-"
"Okay, that was so not my fault-"
"-which wiped out two-thirds of the human population."
"I'd like to remind you that you don't like humans."
"They smell bad when they're dead."
"All you mortal types do. — J.R. Ward

Many bad things were done under the Evil Empire" she said. "The best we can do now is undo them. Will you assist in this endeavor?"
"In every way that I can" said Nutt.
"I would like you to teach them civilized behavior," said Ladyship coldly.
He appeared to consider this. "Yes, of course, I think, that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?"
There was a brief outburst of laughter from Vetinari, who immediately cupped his hand over his mouth. "Oh I do beg your pardon," he said. — Terry Pratchett

Tam Lin says rabbits give up when they're caught by coyotes [ ... ]. He says they consent to die because their animals and can't understand hope. But humans are different. They fight against death no matter how bad things seem, and sometimes, even when everything's against them, they win. — Nancy Farmer

Because humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour? How can an apothecary be evil-tempered but right-thinking? How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen? — Patrick Ness

Visualization is the human being's vehicle to the future - good, bad, or indifferent. It's strictly in our control. — Earl Nightingale

Humans have yet to dwell upon the consequences of their
actions. People have yet to admit the bad that they do to
nature, for example. Actually, most people spend their time
finding fault in the action of others, rather than their own. — Masaaki Hatsumi

Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a "victimless" crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans. — Christopher Gerard

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums. — Yuval Noah Harari

Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck.
Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead. — Maggie Stiefvater

If there's one thing that we're very good at as humans, it's remembering the bad stuff. For some reason, it's always the pain that gets you. — Henry Cavill

I disagree. You want to bring back someone that you've lost. You might want money. Maybe you want women. Or, you might want to protect the world. These are all common things people want. Things that their hearts desire. Greed may not be good, but it's not so bad, either. You humans think greed is just for money and power! But everyone wants something they don't have. — Hiromu Arakawa

Sometimes a hero is unbelievably good for so many but terribly bad for someone else. — Amit Kalantri

I avowed that I was not mad at God. In fact, I felt God's presence at that time more than I ever had. I was never angry, and that didn't make sense to many people. But I knew that God didn't do this. We as humans have free choice, and when people make bad choices, other humans suffer. It doesn't make sense, and we can ask why God didn't fix it or change it. The fact is we do not have the mind of God; as smart as we think we are, we know nothing in terms of what God knows. — Abby Rike

A behavior has occurred that is good, bad, or ambiguous. How have cultural factors stretching back to the origins of humans contributed to that behavior? And rustling cattle on a moonless night; or setting aside tending your cassava garden to raid your Amazonian neighbours; or building fortifications; or butchering every man, woman, and child in a village is irrelevant to that question. That's because all these study subjects are pastoralists, agriculturalists, or horticulturalists, lifestyles that emerged only in the last ten thousand to fourteen thousand years, after the domestication of plants and animals. In the context of hominin history stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, being a camel herder or farmer is nearly as newfangled as being a lobbyist advocating for legal rights for robots. For most of history, humans have been hunter-gatherers, a whole different kettle of fish. — Robert M. Sapolsky

I always felt sorry for humans, spending so much time in front of the mirror. Fixing their hair, makeup, and clothes, mostly to impress others. Did they really see themselves in the mirror? Was it what they wanted to see? Did it make them feel good or bad? And mostly I wondered if they based their self-image on their reflected one. — Ellen Schreiber

The Greeks were more preoccupied with, where these ousted gods resided. That is: The fallen son's of God could go where humans were, but humans could not go where they were. According to Greek mythology, Tartarus was an imposed condition for bad gods
not bad humans. (page 10) — Michael Ben Zehabe

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are. — Umberto Eco

Four legs good, two legs bad. — George Orwell

No human being is so bad as to be beyond redemption. — Mahatma Gandhi

Why do humans never do as they're told? Someone should replace you all with robots. No, on second though, they shouldn't, bad idea. — Jonathan Morris

We humans have known since time immemorial something that science is only now discovering: our gut feeling is responsible in no small measure for how we feel. We are "scared shitless" or we can be "shitting ourselves" with fear. If we don't manage to complete a job, we can't get our "ass in gear." We "swallow" our disappointment and need time to "digest" a defeat. A nasty comment leaves a "bad taste in our mouth." When we fall in love, we get "butterflies in our stomach." Our self is created in our head and our gut - no longer just in language, but increasingly also in the lab. — Giulia Enders

Not all dogs are perfect dogs, but all dogs are inherently good. Like people, we are affected by environment and circumstance. Some breeds get a bad rap because sometimes humans breed them to be a certain way, like overly macho or protective. In our life on earth we are dependent on humans for everything, including our breeding. We can be bred for aggression or we can be bred for peace. — Kate McGahan

So here is the bad news and the good news. The story of human life on Earth is yet to be determined. If there is to be an Act V, it will depend on whether we humans are willing to make changes in our individual and collective beliefs and behaviors and whether we are able to make these changes in time. — Bruce H. Lipton

You mean one human is good, but a hundred humans is bad?" "Exactly. One human is just a person. A hundred humans make a society. And societies have kings, and religions and priests, and all these other things serrin completely fail to understand — Joel Shepherd

Too bad Jason wasn't a metal automaton. At least then Leo would have some idea of how to help his best friend. But with humans ... Leo felt helpless. They broke way too easily. — Rick Riordan

In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

You take risks; you get hurt. And you put your head down and plow forward anyway and if you die, you die. That's the game. But don't tell me you're not a hero. You walk away, you're choosing to walk away. Whatever bad things happen as a result, you're choosing to let them happen. You can lie to yourself, say that you never had a choice, that you weren't cut out for this. But deep down you'll know. You'll know that humans aren't cut out for anything. We cut ourselves out. Slowly, like a rusty knife. Because otherwise, here's what's going to happen: you're going to die and you're going to stand at the gates of judgement and you're going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, 'I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to you to give it meaning. — David Wong

[The] insistence on the absolutely indiscriminate nature of compassion within the Kingdom is the dominant perspective of almost all of Jesus' teaching.
What is indiscriminate compassion? 'Take a look at a rose. Is is possible for the rose to say, "I'll offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people"? Or can you imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? It could do that only be ceasing to be a lamp. And observe how helplessly and indiscriminately a tree gives its shade to everyone, good and bad, young and old, high and low; to animals and humans and every living creature
even to the one who seeks to cut it down. This is the first quality of compassion
its indiscriminate character.' (Anthony DeMello, The Way to Love) ...
What makes the Kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions. — Brennan Manning

Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible ... just bad enough to make it neccessary. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Vulnerability isn't a bad thing. Everyone's vulnerable and it only makes you human. — Benjamin Stone

I just want us to remember than when we became parents, we didn't change species. We're still humans. I mean, we're bad-ass humans, for sure, but humans nonetheless. We make mistakes, all day, and that's good. We want our children to see that. We want them to learn how to handle mistakes because that's an important thing to learn. We expect to make mistakes, we say we're sorry, we forgive ourselves, we shrug and smile, and we try again.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat. — Glennon Doyle Melton

I wasn't exactly sure what "nothing good" meant, but I could imagine in this world of humans, "nothing good" could mean a lot of bad things. — Tamra Torero

This problem," Rick said, "stems entirely from your method of operation, Mr. Rosen. Nobody forced your organization to evolve the production of humanoid robots to a point where - "
"We produced what the colonists wanted," Eldon Rosen said. "We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn't made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have. We knew the risk we were taking when we developed the Nexus-6 brain unit. But your Voigt-Kampff test was a failure before we released that type of android. If you had failed to classify a Nexus-6 android as an android, if you had checked it out as human - but that's not what happened." His voice had become hard and bitingly penetrating. "Your police department - others as well - may have retired, very probably have retired, authentic humans with underdeveloped empathic ability, such as my innocent niece here. Your position, Mr. Deckard, is extremely bad morally. Ours isn't. — Philip K. Dick

I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad - that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad - and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good - for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?
Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43 - why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate. — Norman Mailer

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another. — Steven Pinker

And here's the other problem with consequences. Consequences work on the assumption that a child's core belief about herself is positive and therefore she will choose good things for herself. Many adopted children deep down see themselves as flawed humans who were given away because they were bad. A child who believes he's bad will expect more bad things to happen to him, and will often behave in a way that guarantees more bad things will happen. A child who has been hurt by loved ones will expect hurt from everyone else too. — Mary Ostyn