The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

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

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

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

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.

To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.

I didn’t like the way I looked in pictures – when I saw myself on a digital camera, I was like, ‚Eesh.‘

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things.

Not always actions show the man; we find who does a kindness is not therefore kind.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

I think people take me as seriously as I want them to. They take me as seriously as I take myself – let’s put it that way.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

Anti-Semitism is real in this country.

I don’t like it when people who are young act like they’re 40. That’s taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you’re so mature or whatever – I don’t try to act mature. Some people might say I’m mature for my age, but it’s not something I’m trying to do, you know? I’m just me.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Hatred is settled anger.

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.

No sane man will dance.

Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

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

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

I didn’t do anything at the Queen, whom I admire.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

Please think of me like an endangered species and just observe me quietly from far away. If you try to talk to me or touch me casually, I may get intimidated and bite you. So please be careful.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines.

There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There’s a thing in psychology where they think if it’s popular, it can’t be serious.

I do a little thing about the way people shake the sweetener packet. You know, like they’re all excited. I want to get all the granules down to one end. I love all these rituals.

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.

My concern today is not with the length of a person’s hair but with his conduct.

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

My husband says I look like a Q-tip.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

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.

The more people I reach, the more people there are that have opinions about me. Not everyone loves me, but I have to be okay no matter what they think about me.