Ashley Montagu Quotes

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

– Ashley Montagu

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

– Ashley Montagu

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

– Ashley Montagu

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.

– Ashley Montagu

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.

– Ashley Montagu

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

– Ashley Montagu

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.

– Ashley Montagu

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.

– Ashley Montagu

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

– 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.

– Ashley Montagu

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.

– Ashley Montagu

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

– Ashley Montagu

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

– Ashley Montagu

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

– Ashley Montagu

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

– Ashley Montagu