The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn’t about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

The emotions in a song – the anger, aggression – have got to be legitimate.

It’s plain hokum. If you can’t convince ‚em, confuse ‚em. It’s an old political trick. But this time it won’t work.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‚intelligence‘ and selected ‚leaks.‘

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

I re-invented my image so many times that I’m in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

Boredom is… a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility.

I don’t mind telling a dark side.

I know some really outstanding Turkish journalists, and have been pleased and honored to be able to join with them a few times in their courageous protests against state terror and repression.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

If I hit a man, his head is gonna go into the bleachers.

There’s certainly a side of me that isn’t completely… sane. Or completely ‚even‘ all the time. We all have our dark sides.

The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans.

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you’ll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.

Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid and neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest.

I have no human feelings.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

I am, as a character, at times, a little overbearing. I recognize that.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression – thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

In any court-like environment of power, you will inevitably find people who are drawn to those who are successful or powerful, not out of admiration, but out of secret envy.

Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two – to fix your opponent’s expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

Fool! Don’t you see now that I could have poisoned you a hundred times had I been able to live without you.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

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

On the field, aggression can sometimes be a positive emotion. It boosts performance and can lift your game. But over the years, I have learnt that restrained aggression is a better animal. That way, you will conserve your energy and won’t spend yourself quickly.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

People need motivation to do anything. I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation.

SEALs are human beings. We may all have the same haircuts, but we aren’t robots. Some SEALs are great people. Some are not great people. Some have done unspeakably terrible things. You’re dealing with different people, different dreams, different desires.

Yes, sir, no, sir, clock in, clock out. Why were you late? Why are you not in today? That’s not how humans are supposed to live.

Whatever I am, it’s natural… I don’t have to pretend to be aggressive, don’t have to show the opposition that I am on the field. Being aggressive comes naturally to me, helps me perform.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

The part that always shocked me was the inter-community violence among the chimps: the patrols and the vicious attacks on strangers that lead to death. It’s an unfortunate parallel to human behavior – they have a dark side just as we do. We have less excuse, because we can deliberate, so I believe only we are capable of true calculated evil.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.