The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be… a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man’s actions.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

I believe it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly, unless they have a motive to do otherwise.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

We’re the only animal that wakes up and doesn’t stretch.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

You have a nice personality, but not for a human being.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

The Internet is just another experiment showing us more sides of us.

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

You entertain people who are satisfied. Hungry people can’t be entertained – or people who are afraid. You can’t entertain a man who has no food.

People respond in accordance to how you relate to them. If you approach them on the basis of violence, that’s how they’ll react. But if you say, ‚We want peace, we want stability,‘ we can then do a lot of things that will contribute towards the progress of our society.