A Quote by Eileen Brennan

If we can't laugh at ourselves and the human condition, we're going to be mean.

Eileen Brennan

Quote Topics

Condition Going Human Human Condition Laugh Mean Ourselves

Quote Author

Eileen Brennan
American - Artist
Born: September 3, 1935

People who are mean or unkind or rigid - think about it - cannot laugh at themselves. If we can't laugh at ourselves and the human condition, we're going to be mean.

Eileen Brennan

If I laugh a couple of times a day, I'm doing good. People think it's their God-given right to be happy, and it's just not. It's something you've got to work at. I like to paint the human condition, and the human condition is not smiles and happy people.

John Mellencamp

I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.

Charles Stross

'Man Down' is not a serious study of the human condition: it is a balls-out attempt at making people laugh. So nobody in the show can afford to cling on to any vanity, because we're always going to push the humiliation levels.

Greg Davies

By love I don't mean indulgence. I do not mean sentimentality. And in this instance, I don't even mean romance. I mean that condition that allowed humans to dream of God.That condition that allowed the "dumb" to write spirituals and Russian songs and Irish lilts. That is love, and it's so much larger than anything I can conceive.

Maya Angelou

The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers.

Hannah Arendt

Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.

Michel de Montaigne

Schleiermacher, however, starts by attempting to find what he takes to be a basic element of the human condition as such, namely, that we did not invent ourselves but find ourselves born into a life and a world that precedes us in manifold ways.

George Pattison

I want to make films about the human condition, what we're doing to the world or ourselves.

Ridley Scott

For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.

Anatole France

I always stress condition with my basketball players. I don’t mean physical condition only. You cannot attain and maintain physical condition unless you are morally and mentally conditioned.

John Wooden

In some respects, if I had to choose just one (virtue on the spiritual path), I'd feel safest with a sense of humor. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, have a good laugh about human nature, and get on with our journeys.

Bo Lozoff

The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!

Charles Stross

Comedians are therapists. People honestly think we're doing it for ourselves. No. If we wanted to do stand-up for ourselves, we would perform in front of a mirror and never go to a club. We are giving this away. Some people are going through so much in their lives, they want to hear something else that's going on in the world and laugh.