Quotes on Inclination

I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.

Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations. Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.

But I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?

It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced....Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken pubic support....When the doubt or fear expressed concerns not the success of a particular enterprise but of the whole social plan, it must be treated even more as sabotage.

In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it.

Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.