psychological tendencies Quotes

We as human beings are slightly masochistic. Everybody is ridden with insecurities and they manifest themselves in different ways, whether you're a pleaser, you're mean, you're super-duper sweet and get walked on, or you're a gossip that talks about someone else.

Men are not only prone to forget benefits; they even hate those who have obliged them, and cease to hate those who have injured them. The necessity of revenging an injury, or of recompensing a benefit seems a slavery to which they are unwilling to submit.

And your brain doesn't naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows how to play bridge. "for example," people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that's a trained response. Ordinary people, subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies.

People look like rivers very much: water is everywhere the same, but the rivers are narrow, fast, wide, pure, cold, muddy and warm. The people are the same. They have the rudiment of every human habit in them and they behave according to them. Sometimes they even do not look like themselves, but they still stay whatever they are.

Of course you want to drive that out of yourself because you want to be wise, not foolish. You also have to allow for the self-serving bias of everybody else because most people are not going to remove it all that successfully, the human condition being what it is. If you don't allow for self-serving bias in your conduct, again you're a fool.

Life-complication Theory: Given a choice between an easy solution and a complicated one, the loser will usually opt to travel the complicated path. Don't ignore a solution just because it's simple!

I can't legislate to change human nature.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

Human beings, thanks to culture and genetics, are inclined to be pessimistic, fearful, skeptical and believers in conspiracy theories. We also don't like change.

Human nature is a scoundrel's favorite explanation.

Why can't we resist the urge to second-guess and evaluate each other?...Sometimes I wonder if the final judgment will be a breeze compared with what we've put each other through here on earth. p 225

The powerful have no monopoly on greed, hatred, fear, or ignorance.

In the intercourse of life, we please more by our faults than by our good qualities.

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

Could we know what men are most apt to remember, we might know what they are most apt to do.

As a species we're fundamentally insane.

It is usually the case with most men that their nature is so constituted that they pity those who fare badly and envy those who fare well.

All men are evil and will declare themselves to be so when occasion is offered.

Dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.

You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp itsseat, and rule in its stead.

Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.

Habit is the deepest law of human nature

I was always crazy even before the drugs.

The integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies.

It's the nature of human consciousness to look for trouble constantly, and we find it. We find it.