“We do not need to be able to say what “human nature” is in order to be able to say that some training is “against human nature.””
Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 6.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Paul Goodman47
American novelist, playwright, poet and psychotherapist 1911–1972Related quotes
Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer
Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Fidelity to nature and justifiable untruth, p. 3
Paul Davies (1946) British physicist
Source: The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (1992), Ch. 6: 'The Mathematical Secret', p. 148
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist
"On the Conservation of Force" (1862), p. 279
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist
F 44
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)
Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)
Diary (11 August 1890)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
1860s, Cooper Union speech (1860)
Context: Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling — that sentiment — by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel?
