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.

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

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

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

I’m very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time.

If you want to be more productive, then start at the start: get there on time. Whether it is a meeting, a flight, an appointment or a date, it’s important to ensure you are there when you say you will be there. This may feel like an old-fashioned tip to give, but it has served me well for five decades in business.

I’m never any good in the morning. It is only after four in the afternoon that I get going.

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.

Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.

I don’t do meetings.

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

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

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

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

It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

We live in a time-crunched world, and just about everything we do seems to be urgent.

That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it’s all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort – but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that’s still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do – that’s a huge piece to moving your life forward.

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

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.

No matter what time it is, wake me, even if it’s in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.

The best workers, like the happiest livers, look upon their work as a kind of game: the harder they play the more enjoyable it becomes.

In my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

If I was to go to sleep before midnight, I would feel weird about myself, like I wasted a day. My most productive hours are between midnight and five.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

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.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

Only those who want everything done for them are bored.

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king’s business.

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

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.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I’m crepuscular.

What one has to do usually can be done.

We always have time enough, if we will but use it aright.

It’s human nature to gripe, but I’m going ahead and doing the best I can.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.