Thandie Newton Quotes

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people; it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one's own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them fast.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

I'll say this: The scariest monster in the world is human beings and what we are capable of, especially when we get together.

Humans are lazy but not stupid.

I'm fascinated that people drawn to cults want to know what to do. And people want to know what to think. And people want to know how to feel. Not just what to feel but how to feel.

Interesting to me, at least, is that often you meet certain king of people and you feel, in their company, extremely warm and hopeful that they care about you, but you also think that they probably have 10 other people they put their attention to. You think, "Wow, this person is making me feel so special and like they really love me." But the savvy part of me thinks, "They probably do that to everybody."

I've lived almost, like, four completely different lives. (Stripping) was just one section - one little small section, if that - but it was a very interesting and turbulent but kind of wild ride and I'm not ashamed of it all. I think it's hilarious and I learned a lot about human nature.

I find human behavior really interesting. I think that's ultimately what being an actor is. You explore what it means to be human.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

People readily believe what they want to believe.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

Gentlemen lacking substantial sympathy with their leader found it to be comfortable to deceive themselves, and raise their hearts at the same time by the easy enthusiasm of noise.

For a person to build a rich and rewarding life for himself, there are certain qualities and bits of knowledge that he needs to acquire. But there are also things — harmful attitudes, superstitions, emotions — that he needs to chip away. A person needs to chip away everything that doesn't look like the person he or she most wants to become.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

I don't think that humans are, in our nature, we're evil or anything like that. But I do think there's a demon in our DNA, in our tribal subconscious that affects the way we work and we operate as a group.

If your beliefs are stressful and you question them, you come to see that they aren't true - whereas prior to questioning, you absolutely believe them. How can you live in joy when you're believing thoughts that bring on sadness, frustration, anger, alienation, and loneliness?

So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action.