James Stockdale Quotes

I've always been interested in social psychology and why certain groups of people do things while others don't.

Men are awesome, but they're pretty easy to figure out; women are way more complicated, and way more interesting.

On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.

I think I always gravitated more toward psychological studies and how people behave in a variety of circumstances. Most of the stories that I tell tend to feature women who get caught up in certain situations - end up in some calamity or other.

Part of the reason I wrote the book was I wanted to understand for myself why such good people let themselves get treated so badly.

I work alone. Humans are incredible, because when you come alone, they will receive you, they accept you, they protect you, they give you all things that you need, and they teach you all things you must know. When you come with two persons or three persons, you have a group in front of them. They don't discuss with the new persons what is important to them.

Men are more ready to offend one who desires to be beloved than one who wishes to be feared.

That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.

People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.

Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.

If I could do anything about the way people behave towards each other, I would, but since I can't, I'll stick to animals.

You ever mix two different groups of friends? That can be stressful. You always feel like you have to prep 'em. You're like, "These people over here, uh, they don't think I drink. And don't be thrown by my British accent."

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

You are not the same person working alone as you are in a group; in a romantic setting versus an educational one; when you are with close friends or in an anonymous crowd; or when you are traveling abroad as when at home base.

What's more interesting are the dynamics between people that involve hypocrisy or ignoring each other. That's what I want to write about. I like to make people uncomfortable because it's something we should be uncomfortable about.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball.

Is it better to be loved or feared?

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.

I find people confusing.

no one in a group of three is the same person he (she, it) is in a group of two. No more than he is the same in a group of two as he is alone.

I'm a big fan of human dynamics. Nothing fascinates me more than really interesting people and human dynamics.

For me, storytelling is all about how we learn about each other. I'm so curious about people, what makes them tick, why they are who they are, and how we all relate to each other, despite the fact that we may not think that we do.

In the North the first words are, Help me; in the South, Love me.

And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people.