Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

Desire is the essence of a man.

Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Each generation faces different issues and challenges, but our standard must always be measured by God’s word.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.

Man is a universe within himself.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn’t very good-looking. But in his own way he’d always save the day.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Going home helps the content.

I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

I’ve always liked older ladies, ever since my mother would have B’nai B’rith at our house.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

I’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

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

I remember I used to sleep on my records. In a room with no furniture. I remember I used to sleep in my car.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

Nature is not human hearted.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

I can’t stress to you enough how much I can relate to teens being cyberbullied. Something that helps me is looking at old videos of me and my friends from middle school, or videos of my family. I love watching funny videos of my favorite people – it really cheers me up.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.