O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other. – Thomas Carlyle

I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape. – Desmond Morris

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines. – Italo Calvino

Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps. – Nathalie Sarraute

Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him. – H.G. Wells

Man is nature’s sole mistake. – W.S. Gilbert

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us.  A single sentence will suffice for modern man:  He fornicated and read the papers. – Albert Camus

God pulled an all-nighter on the sixth day. – Author Unknown

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles. – Niccolo Machiavelli

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates. – H. L. Mencken

We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all. – Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Why was man created on the last day?  So that he can be told, when pride possesses him:  God created the gnat before thee. – The Talmud

Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied. – Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. – Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey. – Stephen R. Covey

Evolution:  that last step was a doozy! – Astrid Alauda

But remember please, the Law by which we live, we are not built to comprehend a lie, we can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die. – Rudyard Kipling

On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind. – Sir William Hamilton

Man’s highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A human being:  an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing. – Christopher Morley, Human Being

Human nature, if healthy, demands excitement; and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way, it will seek it in the wrong.  God never makes bloodless stoics; He makes no passionless saints. – Oswald Chambers

I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Monkeys are superior to men in this:  When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey. – Malcolm de Chazal

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. – Friedrich Nietzsche

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. – Stephen Hawking

Human beings invent just as many ways to sabotage their lives as to improve them. – Mark Goulston, Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior, 1996

Man was created a little lower than the angels, and has been getting lower ever since. – Josh Billings

God must love the common man, he made so many of them. – Abraham Lincoln

Adam ate the apple, and our teeth still ache. – Hungarian Proverb