Human beings invent just as many ways to sabotage their lives as to improve them. – Mark Goulston, Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior, 1996

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character… by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. – Carl Linnaeus, 1788

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The doctors tell us of a physical disease called fatty degeneration of the heart… there is a moral malady—fatty degeneration of the soul; sooner or later it attacks every man, however noble his career, who puts self forward in his aims; who values fame because a personal possession. – Frank Lee Benedict, The Price She Paid, 1882