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.

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.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies… if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn’t about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

I’m addicted to placebos.

Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

The United States and our allies are determined: we refuse to live in the shadow of this ultimate danger.

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

Iraq is a long way from the U.S., but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

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.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

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

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you and who’s against you.

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

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.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

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.

Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

For a sitting U.S. president to see our allies as freeloaders is nuts.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.

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

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

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

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

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

Men willingly believe what they wish.

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