A forest ranger who had spent his life in intimate contact with wild nature, animals, and trees then retired to city life, whereupon he made a caustic remark which contained a great indictment. He said, "Hell is people." This thought is curiously like that expressed by one of the characters in a novel by Henry James. A man who was dying said to a visitor, "I think I am glad to leave people." Now what is implied by these two statements? It is not that human beings become a source of torment or of suffering to other human beings. Put in the way these two persons have put it, it is of course not wholly accurate and needs qualification. It would be more correct to say that too many people cause too much trouble for others. If we ask why this is so, we must admit that humans are a mixture of bad and good and that it is only a minority which is striving to strain out the good and to discard the bad.
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 2 : Living in The World > # 407
