psychology quotes

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

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.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

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

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.

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.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

Men and women do think differently, and frankly, we don’t understand each other. Not at all! But that’s what makes relationships so amazing.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people’s bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

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.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don’t necessarily merit fear.

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

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.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

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

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

Ritual is another word for fear, manifested in a different way.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

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

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.

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

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Character is expressed through our behavior patterns, or natural responses to things.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Men are what their mothers made them.

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

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

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

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

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

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

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.

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

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