“No doubt I do act in 'bad faith' when I deliberately avoid facing an honest decision and follow the conventional pattern of behavior in order to be spared the anxiety that comes when one is... thrown into seventy thousand fathoms.”

“Men are only too ready to be swayed by senseless passion.”

“In a sense, New World conquest was about men seeking a way around one of life's basic rules - that human beings have to work for a living, just like the rest of the animal world. In Peru, as elsewhere in the Americas, Spaniards were not looking for fertile land that they could farm, they were looking for the cessation of their own need to perform manual labor. To do so, they needed to find large enough groups of people they could force to carry out all the laborious tasks necessary to provide them with the essentials of life: food, shelter, clothing, and, ideally, liquid wealth. Conquest, then, had little to do with adventure, but rather had everything to do with groups of men willing to do just about anything in order to avoid working for a living. Stripped down to its barest bones, the conquest of Peru was all about finding a comfortable retirement.”

“Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, the processes of coordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the coordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved.”

“Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.”

“I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.”

“although, i always follow the saying "Expect the Unexpected",when the good comes i act ordinarily but when its about the bad ones i act so surprised as i've never expected it i don't know why”