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

About Ashley Montagu

Montague Francis Ashley-Montaguwas a British-American anthropologist who popularized the study of topics such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development. He was the rapporteur, in 1950, for the UNESCO “statement on race”.

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More quotes from Ashley Montagu

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

Ashley Montagu

British-American anthropologist

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

British-American anthropologist

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

Ashley Montagu

British-American anthropologist

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

Ashley Montagu

British-American anthropologist

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

British-American anthropologist

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

Ashley Montagu

British-American anthropologist

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

Ashley Montagu

British-American anthropologist

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

British-American anthropologist

The deepest human 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

British-American anthropologist

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

Ashley Montagu

British-American anthropologist

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

British-American anthropologist

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

British-American anthropologist

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

Ashley Montagu

British-American anthropologist

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

Ashley Montagu

British-American anthropologist