A Quote by Peter Marshall

This is a day of little faith - of few convictions - a day when men seem to have no great causes and no great passions. So in frustration, in disappointment, they are inclined to say, 'You can't change human nature.' It is true that we cannot change human nature. But God can.

Peter Marshall

Quote Topics

Can't Change Cannot Causes Change Convictions Day Disappointment Faith Few Frustration God Great Great Passion Human Human Nature Inclined Little Little Faith Men Nature Passions Say Seem True We Cannot

Quote Author

Peter Marshall
Scottish - Priest
May 27, 1902 - January 26, 1949

To hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition.

Sri Aurobindo

All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is"... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.

John D. Barrow

A small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle... Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account; the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure, change the constitution of man, before we can make it otherwise. No institution, not built on the presumptive truth of these maxims can succeed.

George Washington

It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day.

Frank B. Kellogg

Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.

Ezra Taft Benson

H. G. Wells was not the only one to mention Churchill and Hitler in the same breath: "Churchill and Hitler are striving to change the nature of their respective countrymen by forcing and hammering violent methods on them. Man may be suppressed in this manner but he cannot be changed. Ahimsa [non-violence in the Hindu tradition], on the other hand, can change human nature and sooner than men like Churchill and Hitler."

Mahatma Gandhi

True love can alter human lives and change human nature.

Thomas S. Monson

It's taken us a short time to change the nature of nature. In my lifetime, more change than during all preceding human history put together.

Sylvia Earle

How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change

Elizabeth Lesser

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.

Oscar Wilde

We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.

Theodore Zeldin

What feminism sought to do, when you get right down to it feminism was brought to us by a bunch of angry women whose major grievance and beef was with human nature and God. And they sought to reverse, undo, change, whatever, basic human nature, things that we're born with.

Rush Limbaugh

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys are taught to respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all they say: but even if they should say, which I am sure they never would, 'That cannot exist. That is contrary to nature,' you must wait a little, and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong.

Charles Kingsley

Idealists are people who believe in the potential of human nature for transformation. . . . The most essential attribute of human nature is its mutability and freedom from instinct . . . it is always within our power to change our nature. So it is actually the idealists who are on the mark and the realists who are off base.