It takes 43 muscles to frown and 3 to raise the middle finger.

The bottom line is, insults only hurt when they come from someone I respect.

More and more I feel like the boy who cut off his nose to spite his face.

That's just a fiction, a little game of protocol.

Wildness in animals is a curious thing to us humans. Isn't that why people watch Animal Planet? Escape. Maybe that's why we watch. Animal behavior is elemental. It takes us back to a simpler time.

I actually had to close my eyes, rub them

I don't mind doing awful things as long as somebody else does. I would totally jump off the bridge, thanks for asking.

So you intend to spend the remainder of your life whoring, drinking, wagering, and being as outrageous as you can manage? Bram shook himself. He made it a point to be serious as little as possible,...

He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely...

The prostitute became uncomfortable -- as if 'talk' were in a category of aberrant behavior, short of which she drew the line. 'You have to pay more for that,' the redhead said. 'Talk can go on for a...

Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick...

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

She was a spoiler, a needler, an underminer, a diminisher, simply by instinct.

I didn't ask why anybody would want to risk the electric two-step on the tracks because, as police, all three of us knew that there wasn't anything so stupid that somebody wouldn't try it sooner or...

If a gift, favor, or service incorporates all three features of meaningfulness, unexpectedness, and customization, it can become a formidable source of change.

Cery: So, Hem, tell me why I shouldn't see how many holes I need to make before you start leaking money?

You're trying to convince me? The one who has a second apartment two blocks from her first apartment just so she can get away from her rabbit for a couple of hours a day?

The more the feeling of incapacity and the lack of genuine will increase, the more submission or obsessive desire to please one's whims and insistence on choosing proliferates.

his schedule and the fact that he was

Ridicule was a better defense than truth.

They don't hate us, Bobbie said, her voice tired. They're afraid of us. Then why do they act like they hate us? David's father said with something like triumph. Because that's what fear looks like...

What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world.

The problem with meddling, is that for every problem you solve, you create two more.

You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are...

With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle! He added with a pause: There are no...

No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes,...

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

He's a bully. I love bullies. They have such big, shiny red buttons to push.

The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessly to the will of others is not, for human behavior always...

Fanatics always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.