Quotes About Social dynamics

Democrats offered blacks some of the same security that blacks had during slavery—in which the basic needs of blacks were met on the plantation—and blacks, during a desperate time, went for it.

A film can be undermined by the person you're seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot.

Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.

The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at a bar; sometimes, the affable sense of committee among the men particularly gave me the slight feeling of being interviewed for a job.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society.

Would you call me 'excessive'?" Madison asked Piper. "Not to your face," Piper replied.

Dinner parties bring out the worst in everyone.

Cooperation in about half of the participant pools remained at the initial level, and the higher the level of antisocial punishment in a participant pool, the lower was the rate of increase in cooperation. At best, "altruistic punishment" did not help people to cooperate very much. This seemed to me to capture something of the flavor of real life.

Like most thin-skinned people who have been snubbed, he could not leave the snubbers alone.

crossroads about the same time tomorrow. Ashton spent a few moments chattering about her excuse for being away from Mont Royal; it also involved staying with a friend, a nonexistent one. Madeline heard Ashton's voice, but few of the words registered. The three women crowded into the chaise, Ashton in the middle. It was evident to Madeline that Orry's sister didn't like squeezing against a Negress, but she'd just have to put up with it.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead. - Friedrich Von Schiller, as quoted by Bernard Baruch

Guys are nicer when they aren't with their friends...

I hate when you're nice to the weird kid, and then they stalk your life.

Mean Girls are really just honest bi...es.

She never liked school. The work she enjoyed, the lessons and the teachers. If only school could be just that. But the shoals of girls, forever combing and recombing their hair and snickering behind their hands. Insufferable, they were.

But there's good news, folks. If you play your cards right in situations like the one above, you can avoid violence altogether most of the time. What's more, you can do so without having to back down or feeling like a wimp. These are the social dynamics this book is going to teach you.

Rory breaks violence into two main categories, social and asocial.

When the successive hours of our life are thus displayed against too widely dissimilar backgrounds, we find that we give away too much of ourselves to all sorts of people who next day will not interest us in the least

Humans talk about 'fight-flight.' Isn't binary, quaternary: fight, flight, bluff, submit. Every human is different pattern for different conditions, but all humans have all four to an extent. ... All human interaction works on those four responses ...

Quintana had known Tubbs since high school; Tubbs had been one of the slightly nerdy intellectuals on the edge of the popular clique, while Quintana had been metal shop and a football lineman.

A cop and schoolteacher bar. The teachers drink like fish. The cops hit on the schoolteachers. One big happy family.

In politics as in high school, who you are is to a large extent defined by who you sit with at lunch, and there was no doubt about it, the Earth was sitting at the loser table. It was not, Bob Pope thought, the true destiny of the Earth in our universe to be counted among the diplomatic equivalent of the acne-ridden and the furtively masturbating.

Being famous is just like being in high school. But, I'm not interested in being the cheerleader. I'm not interested in being Gwen Stefani. She's the cheerleader, and I'm out in the smoker shed.