Karl Popper Quotes

My theory was that what I had to do was make a study of human behavior.

Long ago I'd said that I am "fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality" - this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

I used to make my living by understanding people. And the way I learned to understand them was by observing them. I would sit in a train station or a bus station or a restaurant. And I would watch people. I would watch how they related to one another. I would try to get some insight into them and make them as predictable as I could in my mind.

I'm very interested in what makes people tick; people are so weird and complicated.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

People do bad things, but that doesn't mean they don't have other colors or qualities.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

For me, when we're all human beings, it's just interesting that we cannot understand the other person or how they think. That's one part of the human aspect that fascinates me.

We all have these shades in our nature: it's a spectrum within all of us.

I think as long as I can tell you a story about people that you understand, it doesn't matter if you don't like what they do; you understand why they did it.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

I'm someone who likes to explore the complexities in people.

I think that's the magic of any part - unravelling the mystery of what kind of person your guy is based on the words he says and the actions that he does.

Economics is counterintuitive. It just is.

I think to perfectly understand somebody is to predict their next move.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

There's really no "bad" people; there's just humans who are doing the best they can to figure life out. It's hard! We can all relate to that.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

People don't change just because you know more about them.

Although quantum mechanics has been around for nearly 70 years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated, even by those that use it to do calculations.

The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

The more you spend time with a character, the more you see different nuances of that character.