Ashley Montagu

“The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.”

“Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.”

“There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring.”

“Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.”

“Unfortunately, we-especially in the United States-have become increasingly mechanized, so that today we feel very strongly that if we can take anything out of human hands and especially out of the human heart and put it through a machine, we have made progress. Indeed, we flatter ourselves that we can make machines that think like human beings, while not always pausing to reflect that in the process we have also succeeded in making millions of human beings who can feel and think like machines. It is a sorry reflection.”

“The cultured man is an artist, an artist in humanity.”

“The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.”

“The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.”

“The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.”

“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.”

“The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.”

“Girls marry for love. Boys marry because of a chronic irritation that causes them to gravitate in the direction of objects with certain curvilinear properties.”

“The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality.”

“One goes through school, college, medical school and one's internship learning little or nothing about goodness but a good deal about success.”

“The family is the basis of society. As the family is, so is the society, and it is human beings who make a family-not the quantity of them, but the quality of them.”

“The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.”

“It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.”

“The idea is to die young as late as possible.”

“By virtue of being born to humanity, every human being has a right to the development and fulfillment of his potentialities as a human being.”