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

As social animals, we are extremely susceptible to the moods of other people. This gives us the power to subtly infuse into people the appropriate mood for influencing them.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

In most communities it is illegal to cry ‚fire‘ in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

Character is expressed through our behavior patterns, or natural responses to things.

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

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.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

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.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

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

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

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

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

There is no delight in owning anything unshared.

I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

I entered the diocesan seminary. I liked the Dominicans, and I had Dominican friends. But then I chose the Society of Jesus, which I knew well because the seminary was entrusted to the Jesuits. Three things in particular struck me about the Society: the missionary spirit, community and discipline.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

Self-government does not and should not imply the use of political agencies alone. Progress is born of cooperation in the community – not from governmental restraints.

Nature is not human hearted.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I have a big gay and lesbian following and they’ve been very loyal and kind to me.

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

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

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.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

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

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 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.

The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

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.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

I like the enemy knowing there are a few guys like me around.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

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

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

We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.

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

Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.

I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.