Perfectibility Quotes

#1. People can become addicted to fame, money, and attention as deeply as they become addicted to drugs.

Dennis Prager

#2. You cannot demonstrate your own greatness by remaining at one extreme, but by reaching out to both extremes at the same time, and filling the intermediate space.

Giorgio Morandi

#3. The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.

Wyndham Lewis

#4. I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time. I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world peace; I only believe in the human race. I believe the human race must continue.

Martha Gellhorn

#5. The abuser's desire to abuse is not created by the child - it is there before the child appears

Carolyn Ainscough

#6. The natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their efforts equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society.

Thomas Malthus

#7. The great majority of those who speak of perfectibility as a dream, do so because they feel that it is one which would afford them no pleasure if it were realized.

John Stuart Mill

#8. The argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect.

Margaret Atwood

#9. An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#10. Deficiencies in individuals, as in States, have their value and import. Indeed, that sublime impulse of perfectibility, always vivacious, always working under various forms and with one underlying purpose, would be futile without them, and fatuous.

Ameen Rihani

#11. Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

William Godwin

#12. I don't believe in the perfectibility of the individual. What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep?

Emily St. John Mandel

#13. I'm not great at multi-tasking, so when I do one thing ... I like to do it 100%.

Idina Menzel

#14. We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educability of man-the perfectibility of man. We have never addressed ourselves to this problem before.

Jerome Bruner

#15. Look into his mind, his universe. We may think it's sick, but for him, this place is a little slice of paradise. A place where the dead are laid to rest. Just the place the Dominator would come. He walks around here and probably imagines a whole harem of sleeping women right beneath his feet.

Tess Gerritsen

#16. A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.

Hugh Kingsmill

#17. Good heavens! what a foolish thing is this pretended perfectibility of the human race which is continually being dinned into our ears!

Theophile Gautier

#18. The right things? Why did he have to seem so perfect? She was

Melody Anne

#19. One should not be envious of someone who has prospered by unjust deeds. Nor should he disdain someone who has fallen while adhering to the path of righteousness.

Imagawa Sadayo

#20. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

Edgar Allan Poe

#21. China is a rising adversary. So one of the things we have to do if we want China's support is to push back on China.

Carly Fiorina

#22. If debates about beauty in nineteenth-century
France were fierce, that was because beauty was seen to matter. This
was a world of political revolutions, of social reformism, of belief in
progress and human perfectibility. Why was it that beauty mattered so
much in such a world?.

Elizabeth Prettejohn

#23. There was such a relationship between the buffalo and the American Indian - the Indians would eat them, live inside their pelts, use every part of the body. There was almost no separation between the people and the animals.

Val Kilmer

#24. It is not speech or tool making that distinguishes us from other animals, it is imagination ... Of what use are speech sounds and tools without an inspiration toward perfectibility, without a sense that we can create or construct a history.

Louise J. Kaplan