Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

I think Buddhism should open the door of psychology and healing to penetrate more easily into the Western world.

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.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

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

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

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.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

No one loves the man whom he fears.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

In time we hate that which we often fear.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.

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

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.

Love is a serious mental disease.

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.

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

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

In order to fulfill the aspirations of masses, we have to sharpen the tool called the government machinery: we have to make it keen, more dynamic, and it is in this direction that we are working.

Hatred is settled anger.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

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

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There’s a thing in psychology where they think if it’s popular, it can’t be serious.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side… It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people’s bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

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

People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don’t necessarily merit fear.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

The personal ego already has a strong element of dysfunction, but the collective ego is, frequently, even more dysfunctional, to the point of absolute insanity.

Hatred is inveterate anger.