“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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "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…" by Paul Goodman?
Paul Goodman photo
Paul Goodman 47
American novelist, playwright, poet and psychotherapist 1911–1972

Related quotes

Mencius photo

“If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.”

Mencius (-372–-289 BC) Chinese philosopher

Book 6, pt. 1, v. 6
The Mencius

Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“…to be able to say of a representation that it is "exactly like Nature " is by no means equivalent to saying that it is a fine picture.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Fidelity to nature and justifiable untruth, p. 3

Annie Dillard photo
Paul Davies photo

“What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to "unlock the secrets of nature"…”

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 photo

“There is a kind, I might almost say, of artistic satisfaction, when we are able to survey the enormous wealth of Nature as a regularly ordered whole — a kosmos, an image of the logical thought of our own mind.”

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 photo

“The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F 44
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Rutherford B. Hayes photo

“Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier’s occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone.”

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)

Arthur Helps photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“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”

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?

Larry Niven photo

“Anyone who says human nature can’t be changed is out of his head. To make it stick, he’s got to define human nature—and he can’t.”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

The Warriors (p. 142)
Short fiction, Tales of Known Space (1975)

Related topics