The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.
Erich Fromm

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.
Anthony Minghella

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James A. Baldwin

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
James Baldwin

The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.
Robert Quine

The ugly is very appealing to man. It's instinct. One shrinks from the ugly, yet wants to look at it. There's a devilish fascination in it. We extract pleasure from horror.
Sonya Levien

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.
Richard Rorty

The world's as ugly as sin, and almost as delightful.
Frederick Locker-Lampson

The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.
Michel de Montaigne

There are no ugly ducklings.
Loretta Young

There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.
Helena Rubinstein

There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.
Boris Vian

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.
Goldwin Smith

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.
Gertrude Jekyll

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
Elias Canetti

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
H. G. Wells

There was a taboo as a result of the Holocaust that people respected that anti-Semitism was an ugly thing and should be avoided. Now that taboo seems to have been broken with impunity.
Steven T. Katz

There's a danger of the Internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention.
Matt Drudge

There's only so many times you can read how ugly you are and how much people hate you.
Lizzy Caplan