It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

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.

Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

I think I have to trust that you end up with the person you’re supposed to end up with, and that everything in between is there to teach you stuff.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became president.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

To be is to do.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

The will is a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills; Nor can it choose its rider… the riders contend for its possession.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

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

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

I believe nothing happens by mistake. You know, the universe has a divine plan. That sounds dramatic.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.