human-nature

They don't deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white..., they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning.

There__ no snobbery like that of the poor toward one another.

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger__ bleeding to death beside the road, most people won__ stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you__e got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.

Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

A year ago I came here without a nickle in my pocket, now, I've got a nickle in my pocket.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

I sometimes wonder how many beautiful black sweaters have been knit from my wool.

IN THE HANDS OF MANHe who creates a poison, also has the cure.He who creates a virus, also has the antidote.He who creates chaos, also has the ability to create peace.He who sparks hate, also has the ability to transform it to love.He who creates misery, also has the ability to destroy it with kindness.He who creates sadness, also has the ability to to covert it to happiness.He who creates darkness, can also be awakened to produce illumination.He who spreads fear, can also be shaken to spread comfort.Any problems created by the left hand of man,Can also be solved with the right,For he who manifests anything,Also has the ability toDestroy it.

I like living in my head because in there, everyone is kind and innocent. Once you start integrating yourself into the world, you realize that people are nasty, mean creatures. They're worse than zombies. People try to crush your soul and destroy your happiness, but zombies just want to have a little nibble of your brain.

When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely:1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues3. Admire themselves for living up to itBrutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

If you are stealing people's thunder just by being around and standing there; you really can't expect people to like you. People want their own thunder to be heard loud and wide, not yours! Swans should never despair over ducks not liking them.

I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom..." & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.

Always know what they want to hear - not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.

If you keep your head screwed on right in so doing, then your experience thus gained is most valuable in enabling you to gauge human beings and their ways. (Advice in letter from 8th Duke of Rutland, to his son later the 9th Duke.

I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.