Top 68 Quotes & Sayings by Ashley Montagu

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.

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.

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.

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

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

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

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

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

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

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.

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

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

The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don't read what they write, don't ask what they believe, just observe what they do.

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

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

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?

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

The evidence indicates that woman is, on the whole, biologically superior to man.

The way I change my life is to act as if I am the person I really want to be.

Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father, everyone knows that he is little more than chairman, at most, of the entertainment committee.

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.

The idea of "race" represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time.

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.

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

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.

Hatred is love frustrated.

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.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

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 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 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.

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

The only measure of what you believe is what you do.

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 living things whatsoever.

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

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

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

The basic fact is simple: life begins not at birth, but conception.

In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.

The whole of life is a journey toward youthful old age, toward self-contemplation, love, gaiety, and, in a fundamental sense, the most gratifying time of our lives. . . . "Old age" should be a harvest time when the riches of life are reaped and enjoyed, while it continues to be a special period for self-development and expansion.

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

Any form of corporal punishment or 'spanking' is a violent attack upon another human being's integrity. The effect remains with the victim forever and becomes an unforgiving part of his or hier personality--a massive frustration resulting in a hostility which will seek expression in later life in violent acts towards others. The sooner we understand that love and gentleness are the only kinds of called-far behavior towards children, the better. The child, especially, learns to become the kind of human being that he or she has experienced. This should be fully understood by all caregivers.

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

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.

It is the function of women to teach men how to be human.

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 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 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.

I want to die young at a ripe old age.

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

Psychosclerosis: the hardening of the attitude which causes a person to cease dreaming, seeing, thinking, and leading.

The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health.

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

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

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.

To admit ignorance is to exhibit wisdom.