Quotes About Social dynamics

You know what they're like. Mma Ramotswe nodded. She did. They were not all bad, of course. But many of them were awful, which somehow eclipsed the better qualities of some of the nice ones. It was very sad.

The cafeteria made him feel like an observer rather than a participant in the high school experience.

In the minds of their peers, too often students become caricatures of themselves.

Some girls, of course, can be both popular and nice. But niceness involves treating others as equals […]

Limbic consonance is the little-known process through which the mood of a room changes when a happy or nervous person walks in.

we routinely explain social trends in terms of what society "is ready for." But the only way we know society is ready for something is because it happened. Thus, in effect, all we are really saying is that "X happened because that's what people wanted; and we know that X is what they wanted because X is what happened."5

What it means, though, is that the law of the few is not one, but two hypotheses that have been mashed together: first that some people are more influential than others; and second, that the influence of these people is greatly magnified by some contagion process that generates social epidemics.

I'm conscious of race whenever I'm writing, just as I'm conscious of class, religion, human psychology, politics — everything that makes up the human experience. I don't think I can do a good job if I'm not paying attention to what's meaningful to people, and in American culture, there isn't anything that informs human interaction more than the idea of race.

Behavior, in turn, seldom stands neutral.

I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.

I adore watching other people in restaurants, beautiful people toying with steak tartare, hoping to be recognized, married couples eating but not talking, lovers eating each other, illicit couples ducking nevously behind the celery and the gristicks every time the door opens, children doing more whining than dining, storing food in the corners of their cheeks like cherubs at the corner of old maps, then suddenly spraying spinach all over the snow-white tablecloth.

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.

Since I couldn't be the prettiest girl at the party I could at least make it uncomfortable for the one who was.

A few glasses of wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron.

at every party there are two kinds of people - those who want to go home and those who don't. the trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Society than solitude is worse And man to man is still the greatest curse.

It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

Yet introverts and loners are not one and the same thing.

Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?

When I was in high school,we were, like, 4,000 or 5,000 students, and 50 girls - and I didn't have a date for my prom. My father paid my cousin to take me.

I defend a woman's right to cover her hair if she chooses, but the face is central to human interaction, and so the ideologues who promote its covering are simply misogynists.

It was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman: Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do - they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

One thing about the fantasy dinner party idea that no one considers is whether these people are going to get on. I would say John McEnroe and Ian McEwan, but what would they have to say to each other?

'The Breakfast Club' was one of my favorites.