Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

Natural affection is a prejudice; for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.

There may not be a hell, but those who judge may create one. I think people are over-taught. They are over-taught everything. You have to find out by what happens to you, how you will react. I'll have to use a strange term here... "good." I don't know where it comes from, but I feel that there's an ultimate strain of goodness born in each of us. I don't believe in God, but I believe in this "goodness" like a tube running through our bodies. It can be nurtured. It's always magic, when on a freeway packed with traffic, a stranger makes room for you to change lanes... it gives you hope.

I personally think that most people, most of the time, do the right thing. I just believe this. Otherwise, the world would be chaos, and it's not.

I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I'm not talking Santa, here, either.

Over at our place, we’re sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children. But just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us, that maybe the world has made us forget.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

I think that people are born with a certain makeup, and that we're all children of God.

I believe nostalgia has many appearances and that it's not just the privilege of adults. I think children too can have nostalgia. It's one of mankind's most shared emotions. It's one of the things that makes us human. When you live, you lose things. It's a fact of life. So it's natural for everyone to have nostalgia.

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

For every child who wants to be accepted wholly and loved unconditionally, there are others who simply want to be accepted for who they are, even if they receive only a fraction of love. I don't think one cancels out the other. I don't believe that there is any right or wrong... we simply coexist.

There are two men in each one of us: the scientist, he who starts with a clear field and desires to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observations, experimentation and reasoning, and the man of sentiment, the man of belief, the man who mourns his dead children, and who cannot, alas, prove that he will see them again, but who believes that he will, and lives in the hope – the man who will not die like a vibrio, but who feels that the force that is within him cannot die.

On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational -- to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.

A human being tends to believe that the mood of the moment, be it troubled or blithe, peaceful or stormy, is the true, native, and permanent tenor of his existence.

I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.

I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.

When I saw photographs of children murdered by the Fascist, I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of Red atrocities, I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses, in the second only words. . . I gradually acquired a certain horror of the way in which my own mind worked. It was clear to me that unless I cared about every murdered child impartially, I did not really care about children being murdered at all.

I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown people who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.

I don't believe in perfection. I don't think it exists.

Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.

I do characters. I believe in that. I think people are interesting. Now, everybody that you meet in New York City thinks that their life is a movie.

There is a human longing to go back to other times. We all know how when we were children we asked our parents, "What was it like when you were a kid?" I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species.

Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not- even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian- it's only a matter of time.

We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt.

When there are deportations, you better believe there are families involved - there are parents being separated from their children. It doesn't reflect our values as Americans, and I don't think it fixes the issue. I think there would be a lot of advantages to creating paths to citizenship for people who are already working here so they are contributing to our economy.

George Orwell was right. There's no greater genius as far as I'm concerned in terms of understanding human nature. I think that a lot of people just believe anything you tell them, and no matter what it is, they just go along with the program. They're perfectly happy to take their pill every day and do what they're told, and work and buy things, and work and buy things, and stay out of any complex emotional situations. And whatever the authorities tell them to do, they do, and whatever the authorities say is the truth, they believe is the truth.