No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.

I’m addicted to placebos.

I can analyze people’s intentions. Immediately. That’s just a warning. To everyone.

For most of us, relationship with another is based on dependence, either economic or psychological. This dependence creates fear, breeds in us possessiveness, results in friction, suspicion, frustration.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Remember that the essence of authority is that people willingly follow your lead.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

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.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

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

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

I have certain guys who I looked up to. Jordan, Kobe, those guys. Passing that on to doing my part to kind of keep that influence of basketball where it should be is kind of why I play the game.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

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.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken. More: You have ceded them power.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

But there is a difference between cozying up to power and being close to power.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‚There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.‘ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.

A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable.

I feel like I’m changing pop culture.

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.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

Leadership is influence.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

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

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?

Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.

I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.

I am who I am today because of my mother.

He who has great power should use it lightly.

A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

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

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

Kids are watching us. I experience it every single day. They hang on my every word, what I wear, what I say.

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.

If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

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

Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread.

The measure of a man is what he does with power.