Ashley Montagu Quotes

Intellect without humanity is not good enough...what the world is suffering from at the present time is not so much an overabundance of intellect as an insufficiency of humanity.

The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.

Love is the supreme form of communication. In the hierarchy of needs, love stands as the supreme developing agent of the humanity of the person. As such, the teaching of love should be the central core of all early childhood curriculum with all other subjects growing naturally out of such teaching.

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.

You certainly can't tell anything from the microscopic structure of the brain whether the person was an idiot or a genius.

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

Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.

It is not the most lovable individuals who stand more in need of love, but the most unlovable

The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being.

Do we have the right to rear animals in order to kill them so that we may feed appetites in which we have been artificially conditioned from childhood?

No one should be required to see America for the first time.

... the main principle by which human beings must guide the future course of their development is love.

An intelligence that is not humane is the most dangerous thing in the world .

Stand still, close your eyes and listen; in the silence you can hear the cries of pain and low moans of anguish of animals waiting to die... do everything you can even if today it is just one small thing. There are no excuses for inaction, despair, egotism, or petulance that matter to the animals.

I want to die young at a ripe old age.

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.

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.

The loving touch, like music, often utters the things that cannot be spoken.

Human communication, 'as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols' it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

Man is the only 150 pound nonlinear servomechanism that can be wholly reproduced by unskilled labor.

It's by what you do that you communicate to others that you are deeply involved in their well being.

The original mixed ancestry of the Jews and their subsequent history of intermixture with every people among whom they have lived and continue to live.

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.

Without love, intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence, love is not enough.

Ircumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society.

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 world is so full of wonderful things we should all, if we were taught how to appreciate it, be far richer than kings.

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

To admit ignorance is to exhibit wisdom.

For the person and for the species love is the form of behavior having the highest survival value.

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

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

Children are the most learning-hungry beings in the world.

Hatred is love frustrated.

The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.

The benefits to the mother of immediate breastfeeding are innumerable, not the least of which after the weariness of labor and birth is the emotional gratification, the feeling of strength, the composure, and the sense of fulfillment that comes with the handling and suckling of the baby.

In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.

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

It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle

The indications are that swearing preceded the development of cursing. That is, expletives, maledictions, exclamations, and imprecations of the immediately explosive or vituperative kind preceded the speechmaking and later rituals involved in the deliberate apportioning of the fate of an enemy. Swearing of the former variety is from the lips only, but the latter is from the heart. Damn it! is not that same as Damn you!

Because women live creatively, they rarely experience the need to depict or write about that which to them is a primary experience and which men know only at a second remove. Women create naturally, men create artificially.

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.

The measure of man's humanity is the extent and intensity of his love for mankind.

The Good Book - one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.

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

Love, for too many men in our time, consists of sleeping with a seductive woman, one who is properly endowed with the right distribution of curves and conveniences and one upon whom a permanent lien has been acquired through the institution of marriage.