90 Quotes by Ashley Montagu

Human communication, ‘as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols’ it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual’s sensibilities in relation not only to one’s fellow humans everywhere, but to all living things whatsoever.

You certainly can’t tell anything from the microscopic structure of the brain whether the person was an idiot or a genius.

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.

The idea of “race” represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time.

The Good Book – one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.

It’s by what you do that you communicate to others that you are deeply involved in their well being.

The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don’t read what they write, don’t ask what they believe, just observe what they do.

It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle.