It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

If you’re going to wake up early all the time, and you’re working hard, and you’re working out, sometimes you’re going to get tired. It’s OK. It’s acceptable – somewhat. We’re all human, unfortunately.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

I decided, very early on, just to accept life unconditionally; I never expected it to do anything special for me, yet I seemed to accomplish far more than I had ever hoped. Most of the time it just happened to me without my ever seeking it.

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

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

Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became president.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

Hell is other people.

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?

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

Man is supposed to be the maker of his destiny. It is only partly true. He can make his destiny, only in so far as he is allowed by the Great Power.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.

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.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

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

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

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.

Fear is the mother of morality.

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

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

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

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

Seemingly, man has learned to live without God, preoccupied and indifferent toward Him and concerned only about material security and pleasure.

I believe nothing happens by mistake. You know, the universe has a divine plan. That sounds dramatic.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

All men are equal before fish.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

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

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