The conduct of men depends upon their temperament, not upon a bunch of musty maxims.
Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they've received and what problems they are facing.
Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.
If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.
In other characters, it's driven by insecurity, or it's driven by fear, or - there's always a driver. And all the physical manifestations, you need your way in.
Creativity comes from the part of the brain that is veritable soup of experiences, memories and influences. We really don't like to start questioning exactly where it comes from, in case it stops coming.
Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.
No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort 's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong.
My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
What people think, believe, and feel affects how they behave. The natural and extrinsic effects of their actions, in turn, partly determine their thought patterns and affective reactions.
There's not a whole lot of similarity between the two societies, Russian and American. There are similarities behind psychological forces. One thing we can learn is that things can change pretty fast. And this idea that we know who we are and that things can only get so bad in this country - that's wrong.
Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.
It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.
