Pascal on people - 'the glory and scum of the universe'

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and scum of the universe. 
--Blaise Pascal

Quoted in the frontispiece to Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity.