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

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

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.

As a leader, you have to have the ability to assimilate new information and understand that there might be a different view.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

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.

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

There is nothing permanent except change.

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.

I adapt and I adjust to whatever environment I’m in.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

Nobody’s indispensable.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

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.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

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.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

If there’s one thing that’s certain in business, it’s uncertainty.

You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

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

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

In any court-like environment of power, you will inevitably find people who are drawn to those who are successful or powerful, not out of admiration, but out of secret envy.

I have learned to interface – what I think would be the contemporary term – with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I’ve learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.

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

Perhaps I can say that I am a bit astute, that I can adapt to circumstances, but it is also true that I am a bit naive. Yes, but the best summary, the one that comes more from the inside and I feel most true is this: I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.

Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.

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.

Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.

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

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

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

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

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.

Things do not always happen the way I would like them to happen, and I had better get used to that.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

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.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I’m obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

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

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.

Nothing endures but change.

I think politicians really go with the tide.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

One must change one’s tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one’s superiority.

Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid and neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

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

I mean, people aren’t continuing like this and not doing anything because they are evil, or because they don’t want to. We aren’t destroying the biosphere because we are selfish. We are doing it simply because we are unaware.