I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

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

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

I’ve never eaten a strawberry in my life. I have no desire to do that.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

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.

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

Really, I don’t like roller coasters.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

I’m not a chick-flick enthusiast.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

I don’t want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He’s a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

It’s just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we’re in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.

I don’t like talking to celebrities.

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

It’s a big compliment that so many people want to see me. For them, it’s all about football. That’s what they remember about me.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

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

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

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

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

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

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

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

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

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the ‚human stratum‘ may not be homogeneous.

Hell is other people.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

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.