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’m a good teacher and am great at observation and picking out what’s wrong and fixing it.

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.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

I am not some goddess that dropped down from the sky to sing pop music; I am not some extra-incredible human person that needs to be told how wonderful they are all day and kissed.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Give me something to assemble, I won’t look at the directions, I’ll try to figure it out by myself. It’s why I love Ikea furniture.

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

Put your leaders in stressful scenarios. Make them figure out solutions under pressure. See if you can make them frustrated, angry, and flustered, and then demand decisive leadership from them. They will be challenged at first, but they will get better over time.

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

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

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.

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.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

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.

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.

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

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

To be is to do.

If I’ve got a problem with one of my clients that needs to get solved, guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to call them up, and I’m going to say, ‚Hey, here’s what’s going on. This is the situation. This thing went sideways. I didn’t expect it. Now it’s going to take me some more time to get you what you need.‘ But I’m going to do that upfront.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

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.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.

Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.

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

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.