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

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 is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.

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

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

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.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

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.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

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.

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

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you’ll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.

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.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

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

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

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

I really believed that fear is contagious.

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

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.

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

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

The Bible is clear – God’s definition of marriage is between a man and a woman.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

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

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

If we go on your iPhone and go to the dictionary and look up ‚humble,‘ 80 per cent of the definition is negative. It’s a controlling word. It’s a way to control the masses and to control the sheep.

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.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

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

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.

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

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

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

Power is a complicated word and can take many forms.

We’re hardwired for connection. There’s no arguing with the bioscience. But we can want it so badly we’re trying to hot-wire it.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

To ‚choose‘ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

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.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

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

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.