I find it strange the way human nature wants heroes and yet wants to destroy their heroes. It's a kind of mass insecurity people want something to look up to and get a buzz off but at the same time want to destroy it because it makes them feel insecure.

When we think of the major threats to our national security the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores one from nature not humans - an avian flu pandemic.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.

Nature is not human hearted.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance nature compulsions habit reason passion desire.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.

The sun the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

We may brave human laws but we cannot resist natural ones.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

For some reason the evolutionists have not come up with an evolution-based explanation for why human beings react so powerfully to music. But surely they will.

We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems seeing a painting listening to some music some opera which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which more than any other ministers to the human spirit.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

I would say that although my music may be or may have been part of the cultural background fabric of the gay community I consider myself an outsider who belongs everywhere and nowhere... Being a human being is what truly counts. That's where you'll find me.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity and that being able to join in musical activity along with dancing could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

Music is a fantastic peacekeeper of the world it is integral to harmony and it is a required fundamental of human emotion.

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.