Selected social dynamics quotes

1. Speak nothing but the truth, and you'll soon be considered dangerous.

2. No collection of people who are all waiting for the same thing are capable of holding a natural conversation. Even if the thing they are waiting for is only a taxi.

3. Whenever I go out with other married couples, I like to bring along a single crackhead. Just to spice things up.

4. The house of laughter makes a house of woe.

5. Crows pick out the eyes of the dead, when the dead have no longer need of them; but flatterers mar the soul of the living, and her eyes they blind.

6. Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.

7. It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

8. Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humour: he will always use it in evidence against you.

9. He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

10. All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.

11. I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage.

12. Getting talked about is one of the penalties for being pretty, while being above suspicion is about the only compensation for being homely.

13. If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.

14. I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

15. I was shy as a child. Now I'm not really shy any more, unless I'm with shy people. I find it contagious and I don't know what to say. But I don't think shyness is something one should feel apologetic about.

16. Every village has its simpleton, and if one does not exist they invent one to pass the time.

17. I've been accused of being aloof. I'm not. I'm just wary.

18. Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

19. So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

20. All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

21. The American people abhor a vacuum.

22. Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

23. I have no small talk and Peel has no manners.

24. The man that makes a character makes foes.

25. What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

26. A hidden connection is stronger than an obvious one.

27. Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.

28. There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen - despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths...

29. You are about to have your first experience with a Greek lunch. I will kill you if you pretend to like it.

30. They hate you if you're clever, and they despise a fool.

31. When I finally gathered, invented, stole, simplified, borrowed, and found a publisher for a clutch of reasonably foolproof recipes, I learned I had friends I hadn't known about-more proof that a mutual dislike can be quite as sound a basis for friendship as a mutual devotion.

32. You just don't expect posh girls to grab your tits, call your trousers 'too clitty' and use words like 'pussy pelmet' but they do. You are so shocked by what they are saying that by the time you have recovered and thought of something to say they have whipped you out of your jeans and eased you into a Lycra cat suit.

33. Please everyone without becoming a hypocrite or a coward.

34. 'Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.'

35. 'Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.'

36. Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys, Unfriendly to society's chief joys, Thy worst effect is banishing for hours The sex whose presence civilizes ours.

37. A man's own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to every one else.

38. Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.

39. Authority is not a quality one person 'has,' in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him. But there is a fundamental difference between a kind of superiority-inferiority relation which can be called rational authority and one which may be described as inhibiting, or irrational authority.

40. It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.[1]

41. You know what you look like with your good bag and your bad shoes? You look like a rube.

42. Like will to like.

43. Every woman is infallibly to be gained by every sort of flattery, and every man by one sort or other.

44. She's got a cheap cell phone and the host left and now I'm all alone. sigh

45. Achte dich selbst, wenn du willst, dass andere dich achten sollen!

46. Gar zu leicht missbrauchen oder vernachlassigen uns die Menschen, sobald wir mit ihnen vertraulich werden. Um angenehm zu leben, muss man fast immer ein Fremder unter den Leuten bleiben.

47. Wir sehen die klugsten, verstandigsten Menschen im Leben Schritte tun, uber die wir den Kopf schutteln mussen.

48. In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

49. 'I accepted the face that as much as I want to lead others, and love to be around other people, in some essential way, I am something of a loner.'

50. There's a new party being born: The People Who Hate People Party. People who hate people, come together! 'No!' We're kind of having trouble getting off the boards. Come to our meeting! 'Are you gonna be there?' Yeah. 'Then I ain't fucking coming.' But you're our strongest member! 'Fuck you!' That's what I'm talking about, you asshole! Fuck off! Damn, we almost had a meeting going. It's so hard to get my people together.

51. If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street, and I'm not dressed up or I'm not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I'm talking down to them.

52. 'I find sometimes it's easy to be myself, sometimes I find it's better to be somebody else.'

53. As much as people pretend 'I fit in, I understand, I get the rules,' there are always times spent away from that where you go, 'I thought I knew. It seemed so clear to me, and then...' That sense of loneliness, or the sense of not fitting in or being out of depth, is probably the most common denominator.

54. 'You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic; poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured.'

55. 'A girl can't control who will and who won't fall in love with her, Ethan. And sometimes, when a nuisance person falls in love with you, it can be awfully: awkward.'

56. Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone. For this brave old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air. The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care.

57. Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go. They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all. There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life's gall.

58. The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

59. It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering.

60. The pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas. To survive you one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character. In your luncheon-parties, in old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the debris of the feast. I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor.

61. He who is punished is never he who performed the deed. He is always the scapegoat.

62. The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation.

63. Barbara wrote that his brain frightened her. It was sharp and clear and cruel. She admired him for being always unsentimental, but noted 'always remember to rely on yourself ... if you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.'

64. I have nothing but respect for you, and not much of that.

65. Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.

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

67. No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

68. Be nice to people on your way up, because you're going to meet them all on your way down.

69. Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.

70. Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.

71. never considered myself an outsider. But I definitely didn't consider myself an insider. (2006)

72. I've always liked everybody. [Laughs.] I'm not sure everybody likes me.

73. It seems unfortunate that strong people are usually so disagreeable and overbearing that no one cares for them. In fact, to be different from your fellow creatures is always a misfortune. The Growleywogs knew that they were disliked and avoided by every one, so they had become surly and unsociable even among themselves.

74. There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.

75. We modest Gentlemen don't want for much success among the women.

76. Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

77. It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

78. Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay.

79. Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

80. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.

81. Too often, when you introduce a ringer into a gaggle of Pekes, there ensues a scrap like New Year's Eve in Madrid; but tonight, after a certain amount of tentative sniffing, the home team issued their O.K., and he left them all curled up in their baskets like so many members of The Athenaeum.

82. Oh, about beer I never lie. A man who lies about beer makes enemies.

83. If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.

84. SA boys received him coolly.

85. The art of pleasing is the art of deception.