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

Reviews condition people. At the end of the day, a lot of human minds are malleable. They can be easily shaped with strong words.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

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.

What’s coming will come and we’ll just have to meet it when it does.

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

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

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.

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.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

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

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.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

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.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

Nobody’s indispensable.

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 world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.

I think politicians really go with the tide.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

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

My company survives because I’ve learned to respect the ideas of people younger than me and recognize when my wisdom is obsolete.

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.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

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

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

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 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.

Ultimately, I’m not doing that much. I’m only doing what a human being who feels wants to do – in my way, without stepping out of my flow, while staying in my lane. Without, I guess, boring people.

The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.

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.

Wherever the enemy wants to fight, we will follow him to the ends of the Earth. We’ll adapt, we’ll train, we’ll advise, we’ll mentor, and we’ll fight, and we’ll fight well.

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.

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

I believe it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly, unless they have a motive to do otherwise.

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

Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

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.

We’re the only animal that wakes up and doesn’t stretch.

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.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

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

Yeah, I wasn’t chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn’t planned by anyone.

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

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

If the team keeps changing then everything has to keep changing.

I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.

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.

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