"The motives which predominate most human affairs," he once said, "are self-love and self-interest".
istorians of the last great war have all duly noted that fighting, like most human affairs, is now in the hands of bureaucracy.
But the single most powerful force in giving, as in most human affairs, is an intimate association between giver and recipient.
An argument can be made that the human attribute that most drives human affairs is awareness of individual mortality, an awareness that pervades all human interactions, strategies, personal choices, all of human history and politics, and all of the arts.
It takes little imagination to see how these assumptions have guided most realms of human affairs, from policy making to media portrayals of social life.
This creaking saga, which purports to tell of how the tree that grew from Adam's body became the cross upon which Christ was crucified, is without doubt the religious story that makes its way most tortuously through human affairs.
On occasion, there are clear-cut moral issues: the rights of minorities or women to a full share in public life, say; but usually even those of us most passionate about human affairs recognize that we're on one side of a debate, that there are legitimate arguments to the contrary (endless deficits, coat-hanger abortions, a resurgent al-Qaeda).
It was "among the most noble experiences in human affairs," its representative in Europe said.
Without it, most discovery and most of the progress in human affairs would never have occurred.
Most of us in the west imagine ourselves to be living in secularised societies, but the religious impetus towards the manufacture of meaning for human affairs underlies most of our assumptions about what we are, where we came from and, most significantly, where we are going.
A widely reported story has He Yan declaring that Wang Bi was one with whom one could discuss the most profound truths about the cosmos and human affairs (e.g., see Sanguo zhi [Records of the Three States] 28).
