Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.

Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

All emotion is involuntary when genuine.

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 have no human feelings.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

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

Men are what their mothers made them.

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

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.

If you like a person you say ‚let’s go into business together.‘ Man is a social animal after all, but such partnerships are fraught with danger.

We’re in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

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

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

A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

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

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

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.

America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

For most of us, relationship with another is based on dependence, either economic or psychological. This dependence creates fear, breeds in us possessiveness, results in friction, suspicion, frustration.

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.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.

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.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the 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.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.

War is the province of danger.

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.

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.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

The danger sensation is exciting. The challenge is to find new dangers.

In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.

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.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

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

Where the mind goes, the man follows.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

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

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

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

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

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

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

Men and women do think differently, and frankly, we don’t understand each other. Not at all! But that’s what makes relationships so amazing.

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.