Simon Conway Morris Quotes

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

Atrocities are human nature - they don't have political beliefs, color, creed or anything like that. They just happen, it's human.

I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.

Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!

Alas, the world has never known a sound social fabric, a fabric sound and clean to the core and kindly. For it has ever turned its back on Man.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there:

History is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes

Human beings can do some God-awful things to other human beings

The population of Belgium ... behaved in a diabolical not to say, bestial manner… They tormented the wounded, beat them to death, killed doctors and medical orderlies, fired secretly … on men harmlessly standing in the street… The King of Belgium has to be notified at once that since his people have placed themselves outside all observance of European custom … They will be treated accordingly

Man's indecency to man all over the world rules out the idea of humanity as an actuality. It is a dream of young idealists. In practice a misnomer

The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.

I'm fascinated by what people will do to each other. Actually, I'm sort of interested in the gory details of life.

There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.

The malignity and inhumanity of the Greek military authorities are undisguised.

The norm was to kill everyone who was kidnapped. And anyone kidnapped was tortured … torture didn’t always work. It left people too destroyed …Torture is eternal. It has always existed and always will. It is an essential part of the human being …. Not one innocent person passed through my hands.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured, but we can reduce the number of tortured children.

Everywhere Bulgarians had passed, one sees only blood, dishonor and ruin …. It is a refinement of cruelty which the imagination refuses to comprehend.

The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motive.

… musty deposits of 2000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness.

What terms could be found to express our horrors for the organizers of such a holocaust had it taken place in darkest Africa? Yet these ministers thought they were God service: they had scripture at their fingertips.

It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible. And the laws, as they stand today, are almost inconceivably stupid. With all this brilliant scientific knowledge of atom splitting and nuclear physics, etc., we are still worshipping at different shrines, imprisoning homosexuals, imposing unnecessary and completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. Hearts can be withdrawn from human beasts, dead hearts, and, after a little neat manipulation, popped back again as good as new. The skies can be conquered. Sputniks can whiz round and round the globe and be controlled and guided. People are still genuflecting before crucifixes and Virgin Marys, still persecuting other people for being coloured or Jewish or in some way different from what they apparently should be. There are wars being waged at this very moment in Indonesia, Algeria, the Middle East, Cyprus, etc. The Pope still makes pronouncements against birth control. The Ku-Klux-Klan is still, if permitted, ready to dash out and do some light lynching. God, for millions of people, is still secure in his heaven, and My Fair Lady opened in London last night.

… the most barbarous stroke in human annals.

… most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical.

The soldier's lot is the most melancholy relic of barbarism (next to capital punishment) that lingers on among mankind.