If I say, "I am a monk." or "I am a Buddhist," these are, in comparison to my nature as a human being, temporary. To be human is basic.
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"Kindness and Compassion" p. 47Dalai Lama
The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx’s concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and ... can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".
Erich Fromm
Monk enters the studio and starts playing, the rest of the musicians join him. After few minutes of play the technician from his room shouts and stops the band.]
Monk: "Why did we stop?"
Technician: "I thought you were rehearsing."
Monk: "Aren't we always?"Thelonious Monk
Havel ... invokes ... "higher law" when he claims that "human rights, human freedoms . . . and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world …while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God." He seems to be saying that NATO forces were allowed to violate international law because they acted as direct instruments of the "higher law" of God — a clear-cut case of religious fundamentalism.
Vaclav Havel
I would not hesitate to say that nine out of ten of the critics of the peace movement get the argument turned upside down. "You cannot change human nature" has become a sort of incantation with those critics. Perhaps you cannot "change human nature" — I don't indeed know what the phrase means. But you can certainly change human behavior, which is what matters, as the whole panorama of history shows.
Norman Angell
Dalai Lama
Daley, Richard J.
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