Quotes About Psychology

Let me put it this way: I definitely need to understand the villains I play. The best cause pain to anesthetize themselves against their own pain.

I don't think villains think they are villains.

Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.

Disgust is a very powerful tool for bringing about crowd violence. If a group can be dehumanized and made into the Other, the 'them,' to treat that group horribly is made much easier.

As much as they deny it, I think people want to be scared. It's a phenomenon, why people want to be scared when there is so much violence and craziness in the world. People still really enjoy being scared. It's a conundrum to me. It's hard to explain. It's an unconscious thing, really, why people like that so much.

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

Police departments across the nation must develop nonviolent 'rules of engagement,' so that they don't reflexively respond to suspected crimes with violence. This will require more in-depth training in the behavioral psychology of conflict resolution so police have tried-and-true techniques of preventing and de-escalating violence.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

Physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind.

Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.

I've made plenty of violent games in my life. I play violent games. They don't affect people in the way that a lot of people think they do. They just don't. It's demonstrably true that they don't, and anybody who thinks they do is just not thinking.

Violent behavior exists in one's psychological makeup much deeper than the level that receives information from television or movies.

I think everybody who commits a violent killing is in some way crazy. But that doesn't mean we can let them off the hook for that.

The thing about a violent kid is that he can't play imaginatively.

Today's ghost stories tend to be much more physically or psychologically violent. The Victorians were much more leisurely about what might or could happen, building suspense layer by layer rather than punching you in the face.

I have recurring dreams about losing my temper, which become quite violent. I dread to think what that says about me.

I think children are really violent with each other often.

Fear and greed are potent motivators. When both of these forces push in the same direction, virtually no human being can resist.

As far as I am concerned, virtually all psychological diseases have their origin in our conscious minds. And that is not what we are taught.

The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.

Psychologically experienced consciousness is therefore no longer pure consciousness; construed Objectively in this way, consciousness itself becomes something transcendent, becomes an event in that spatial world which appears, by virtue of consciousness, to be transcendent.

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side... It has revealed to us much about man's shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.