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Quotes about Human Nature from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Some think that human nature never changes, that we will always have war, haves and have-nots, and the kind of exploitive selfishness that makes a better world seem impossible. But when we see how values and the worldviews they construct actually do evolve—that as the spiral is ascended "human nature" does evolve?we can begin to perceive the new set of life conditions which contain the new opportunities for evolution that are now before us." - Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (Get the book.)

"We become wiser about human nature —its virtues and its failings. We accept the ways of nature. We become less attached to our possessions; less upset by events of little consequence; less needful of others' appreciation. Many of us become better at living in the present. And some of us come to accept our own mortality. A few of us may even come to know that we are free, that our well-being is not dependent on the world we perceive. These enlightened ones may release themselves from all their imagined burdens and find true peace of mind." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.)

"People with different beliefs about God and human nature have since the beginnings of recorded history described their realization of a Reality that is both immanent and transcendent to this universe. Modern studies of secular and religious ecstasies by William James, Marghanita Laski, Raynor Johnson, Edward Robinson, and others have produced many detailed accounts of such experience." - Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution Of Human Nature (Get the book.) "Given the hierarchical structure of human nature, it is plausible that the cures discussed here involve many levels and kinds of therapeutic transaction.2 The kinds of healing discussed in this chapter, then, differ from other types of therapy by their partial or total reliance upon vital energies such as ki, psi influence, holy places, deep regions of the self, or supracosmic agencies.* They are often accompanied by a sense of the numinous, of contact with a transcendent power and light." - Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution Of Human Nature (Get the book.) "However, by seeing that we can integrate the many dimensions of our human nature in a "harmony of various strains," as Aurobindo put it, and by appreciating the fact that such integration is analogous to the subsumptions evident in earlier stages of evolutionary progress, we can draw upon our rich heritage and cultivate the full range of our greater potentials. Panpsycbism and Animistic Interactionism Like the emergent evolutionists noted above, the philosophers Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne have emphasized the novelty evident at all levels of the universe." - Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution Of Human Nature (Get the book.)

"The vision we need can be, and indeed must be, grounded in the best insights we have into human nature and the nature of the world in which the human world is embedded. The vision of the world in which modern people place their trust is the one they consider scientific. This vision is based largely on the physics of Newton, the biology of Darwin, and the psychology of Freud. However, these conceptions have been overtaken by new discoveries. In light of the emerging insights, the universe is not a lifeless, soulless aggregate of inert chunks of matter, rather it resembles a living organism." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.)

"Thirty years ago, as a young psychiatrist, I would have been outraged by the claim that drugs can influence human nature and human choice-making to such a degree. At that time, I rejected the idea that a drug could make any of us do anything we genuinely did not want to do. Then in the early 1980s, I began researching more thoroughly into the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs and wrote Psychiatric Drugs: Hazards to the Brain (1983). The result?" - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"That's human nature. Physicians are human. Sometimes our beliefs turn out to be correct, to be prescient. Sometimes they don't. Not long ago, tonsils were removed because they were swollen and uteruses because they were lumpy. We got it wrong with stents, too. Let me tell you how. Fifty years ago, heart attacks were a scourge. Everyone knew a working-age man who'd dropped dead from one. Medicine seemed stymied. That's when it became clear that the large arteries that feed the heart muscle, the coronary arteries, were clogged by atherosclerotic plaque in nearly every man who had a heart attack." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"LIKE ABUSERS IN THE FAMILY THERE IS SOMETHING in human nature that rebels against being found wrong. When parents are caught abusing their children, or when husbands are caught abusing their wives, often their first tendency is to escalate the abuse. It's as if they are saying defiantly, "I'll show you that you can't stop me!" For this reason, it's important to take strong action against abusers rather than to rely on simply warning them. I cannot exaggerate how reflexively my colleagues reject any suggestion that their drugs could be making their patients worse, let alone crazy." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"Ultimately, however, the conclusions we draw from such evidence depend on our view of human nature and the extent of human abilities to produce consistent and independent judgments. To consolidate our understanding of the argument, we turn, in the next part, to a study of fundamental psychological factors?human tendencies to act independently or to acquiesce, to believe others or to disbelieve them, to feel confidence or self-doubt, to be attentive or inattentive. These tendencies bear on the plausibility of our view of speculative bubbles." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"As long as some part of you still believes that being fat will make you be safe, you will always return to fat. It's human nature to return to safety whenever possible. Your Logical Mind Knows Better Your conscious, rational mind probably finds the idea of using food for protection an absurd notion. Most likely you consider fat a curse—not a warm, fuzzy blanket to snuggle inside, and so if you do, in fact, hide behind fat in order to protect yourself, chances are good that you haven't been aware of it. Chances are good that you feel uncomfortable with this material." - Roger Gould, Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever (Get the book.)

"I also hope they will add to our knowledge about how drugs act upon human beings and about human nature itself. _Ctiapfgp 1 Killing the Pain—and Almost the Cop IF HARRY HENDERSON had been able to reflect on his behavior at the time, his mission would have seemed tragically and senselessly absurd—something no man in his right mind would consider carrying out. Nothing in Harry's thirty-eight years suggested that he was capable of such a horrendous act. Yet he would become an extreme example of the havoc caused by medication madness. Everything was going well with Harry's wife and family." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"Liedloff evaluates Western society and human nature through the lens of the Stone Age Indians she spent two and a half years observing in the jungles of Venezuela. Life Before Birth: The Challenges of Fetal Development by Peter Na-thanielsz can be a little technical at times, but it has a lot of great information on toxins and pregnancy. Super Baby by Sarah Brewer provides excellent tips for boosting your child's intelligence while he's still in the womb. Diet and Nutrition The Complete Organic Pregnancy has a lot of great information about organic food." - Deirdre Imus, Growing Up Green: Baby and Child Care: Volume 2 in the Bestselling Green This! Series (Green This!) (Get the book.)

"That is human nature. Also hampering efforts to understand how many people die from their medicines is the fact that hospitals no longer perform autopsies on most patients. That means the evidence of the true causes of patients' deaths is buried right along with them. The autopsy rate in the nation's hospitals has plummeted, from 50 percent after World War II to less than 8 percent today. Some hospitals perform no autopsies despite the many patients who die within their walls." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"If you have trouble accepting the spirit aspect of human nature, then you may have some difficulty. Everything in the universe is energy. Energy is never destroyed. It just changes form, and form includes us. Even though we are temporarily occupying a body, we are spirit or energy that will always be. Energy creates matter, be it physical objects or parts of our body; scientists are proving this every day. Our thoughts are energies that create positive or negative outcomes, according to their kind, whether we realize it or not. Thoughts in turn, are created by our mind." - Ron Garner, Conscious Health: A Complete Guide to Wellness Through Natural Means (Get the book.) "It is an odd characteristic of human nature that we usually take better care of our cars and other machines, servicing them with proper parts and materials. We wouldn't think of putting diesel fuel in a gasoline engine or dirty oil in the crankcase. Similarly, we try to take care of our household plants and gardens so they will yield good blossoms, fruit, and vegetables. We wouldn't use salted water, soft drinks, or alcoholic beverages on the potted plants in our houses, or feed them grease from cooking. If we want them to be healthy, we cultivate and nourish the soil." - Ron Garner, Conscious Health: A Complete Guide to Wellness Through Natural Means (Get the book.)

"Dr Bach believed that the basis of disease was the disharmony between the spiritual and mental aspects of human nature. He developed his remedies from well-known flowers and plants. The principle behind their use is that every disorder—physical or psychological—arises because of an inner imbalance for which nature has provided a cure, in the form of healing plants, sunlight, spring water and fresh air. It is certainly true that asthma can be the result of mental disharmony and imbalance: stress is known to cause asthma, and fear is a potent trigger." - Dr Ron Roberts, Asthma Controlled Naturally: Techniques That Work (Get the book.)

"To offer me a doctor as my judge, and then weight his decision with a bribe of a large sum of money and a virtual guarantee that if he makes a mistake it can never be proved against him, is to go wildly 43 beyond the ascertained strain which human nature will bear. It is simply unscientific to allege or believe that doctors do not under existing circumstances perform unnecessary operations and manufacture and prolong lucrative illnesses. He questioned surgeons' professionalism and their honesty," said Fran. "Which was fair game, and still is." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do—that and human nature. By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular actual food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is precisely what we did." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.)

"Once you begin to make these changes in an eating plan, you feel less and less committed to it. It's human nature. You're not really following Diet A: You're following your version of Diet A. But as you move farther and farther from the recommendations, your success rate probably plummets until you throw in the towel. SuperFoodsRx Diet in a Nutshell We've tried to make the SuperFoodsRx Diet the most effective, easy to follow, healthiest diet in the world." - Wendy Bazilian, DRPH, MA, RD, Steven Pratt, MD, Kathy Matthews, Superfoods Rx Diet: Lose Weight with the Power of SuperNutrients (Get the book.)

"If the head is lost, all that perishes is the individual; if the balls are lost, all human nature perishes. —Francois Rabelais, 16th-century French author A SWOLLEN PENIS HEAD Probably we've all met a few men with swollen heads. But if the head of a man's penis (glans penis) is swollen, he may have nothing to be proud about. Rather, he may be sporting a medical condition called balanitis, a sign that he's not practicing good personal hygiene. He may even have a smelly discharge. If a man's not circumcised, his foreskin (prepuce) may also become inflamed—a condition called posthitis." - Joan Liebmann-Smith, Ph. D., and Jacqueline Nardi Egan, Body Signs: From Warning Signs to False Alarms...How to Be Your Own Diagnostic Detective (Get the book.)

"People are such social creatures that even when an institution does everything possible to keep them from communicating with one another, human nature triumphs over this control. This is true in schools, prisons, and plantations. However, while the force of human nature is powerful enough to overcome institutional impediments to connecting, people often don't learn the skills and wisdom required to maintain satisfying relationships. Friendships and marriages are complex and require many skills and much wisdom." - Bruce E. Levine, Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Get the book.)

"First, to the extent that these urges helped our ancestors act quickly and decisively in life-threatening circumstances, it explained how the forces of natural selection shaped and preserved emotions as part of our universal human nature. Second, it explained why emotions could infuse both mind and body by orchestrating a cascade of physiological changes. Within the science of emotions, the value added by the concept of specific action tendencies was huge. It's no wonder that scientists were wedded to it." - Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life (Get the book.) "Witnessing human nature at its very best can inspire and uplift you. Perhaps you see a colleague step away from his own pressing schedule to patiently help a disoriented older man find his way through the labyrinth of the medical center. Or you see tennis genius Roger Federer play a flawlessly fluid game in the U.S. Open.14 You read the work of a poet who seems to see into the core of the human soul. Or you witness one of your role models doing what she does best. Feeling inspired rivets your attention, warms your heart, and draws you in." - Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life (Get the book.)

"It is human nature for a decision maker in a contracting company to look more favorably next time on a petition from a cro that generated a happy result last time. Since nearly all these trials are seeking small effects at most, inaccurate data, slight biases, and nuances in analyses are critical. There are well-documented instances of abuses in all such areas. However, there is precious little call for reforms to cleanse the drug-testing process such as those I offer in the text of this chapter and formulated in a long-ignored paper (Hadler and Gillings 1983)." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"But it is human nature to think that if eating some vitamins and minerals is good, eating more of them has to be better, especially since it is not possible to know the nutrient content of the food you eat with any degree of precision. Marketers know this about human nature, and they take full advantage of any doubts you might have about the nutritional quality of your diet. If drinking minerals seems like a good idea, drinking vitamins might seem even more so. But there is one problem: vitamins taste awful. You can test this for yourself at home." - Marion Nestle, What to Eat (Get the book.)

"This human nature is parading now toward changing values. This human nature is you and I and everyone else lifting our eyes toward those banners that lead the parade, and saying in our hearts with them: "We are the sources of all movements, the mothers of all gatherings, and the creators of all religions. We have spawned the visionary Bohemian rhapsody of love, freedom, and beauty throughout the world. We bring joy everywhere with our entertaining way of enlightening everything on our path." "We have opened the hearts of children who seek the truth about Life and Earth and Spirit." - APC Books, Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves: The Power of change Within to Change the World (Get the book.)

"But when we see how values and the worldviews they construct actually do evolve—that as the spiral is ascended "human nature" does evolve?we can begin to perceive the new set of life conditions which contain the new opportunities for evolution that are now before us." - Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (Get the book.) "According to Gardner, "'Morality' is then properly a statement about personality, individuality, will, character—and, in the happiest cases, about the highest realization of human nature."7 Mainstream professional academics such as Gardner define themselves as social scientists, so it is understandable that they want to "stick to science" and avoid any theoretical descriptions of consciousness as a whole. And Gardner is right when he says that the emotional and moral aspects of the mind are largely beyond the reach of science." - Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (Get the book.)

"However, while the force of human nature is powerful enough to overcome institutional impediments to connecting, people often don't learn the skills and wisdom required to maintain satisfying relationships. Friendships and marriages are complex and require many skills and much wisdom. Many of us in our relationship-retarded culture increasingly don't have what it takes. People are often unhappy and depressed to the extent that they are exclusively preoccupied with their own needs, and in any extreme consumer culture, people are socialized to be extremely self-preoccupied." - Bruce E. Levine, Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Get the book.)

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