You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
Interpretation
Human intelligence doesn't fundamentally change human nature.
This quote by Philip Roth suggests a skepticism towards the idea that human intelligence can overcome or improve human nature. Despite advancements in knowledge and technology, the underlying instincts and flaws of humanity remain unchanged, indicating that intelligence alone cannot dictate our behavior or moral compass.
In practice
During a debate about the role of technology in society, one could use this quote to emphasize the limits of intelligence in changing human behavior.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it–how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.
For men in a state of freedom had thatch for their shelter, while slavery dwells beneath marble and gold.
Being an Indian means living with the land. And the only way we'll be able to do that is to gain our freedom.
In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I'm just there to help them transition, however they need to do it.
It may be you fear more to deliver judgment upon me than I fear judgment.
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