Quotes About Behavior

cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat." If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don't understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.

something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop.

You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct." "Sir? I thought—But he does! I have." "No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not—and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

The unconscious is a marvelous universe of unseen energies, forces, forms of intelligence—even distinct personalities—that live within us. It is a much larger realm than most of us realize, one that has a complete life of its own running parallel to the ordinary life we live day to day. The unconscious is the secret source of much of our thought, feeling, and behavior. It influences us in ways that are all the more powerful because unsuspected.

SYNERGY: those behaviors of whole systems which cannot be predicted by analysis of parts or sub-systems. A term popularized by Buckminster Fuller and roughly equivalent to Holism. Cf. Gestalt in psychology and transaction immediately following:

Among domesticated primates, emotions also confer status and power. That is, the most emotional person in the room "dominates" everyone else in the room: they must all react to his or her emotions, one way or another, or surrender the turf by retreating from the room entirely.

Conversely, shrinking the body and muttering (or becoming totally silent) make up the usual Submission reflex. Crawling away with its tail between its legs, the dog's submission reflex, does not differ much from the body-language of an employee who made the mistake of disagreeing with the boss and received a Dominator (flexing/howling) signal in response.

It's possible that a meteor will come hurtling in from outer space and wipe out this whole city." And so on. The neutral and objective view that covered any other experience in Holy Out's life just couldn't reach the area of the first shot; that was permanently buried under everything he had ever read about the causes of deviant behavior.

And I think it's very stupid behavior, too, because conspiracies decrease human intelligence which is the function of precise and open communication. But I do think conspiracy is a factor. There is a lot of contemporary history that cannot be understood unless you assume a multitude of conspiracies, all somewhat stupid at times.

2. Due to state-specific information, as discussed earlier, when you have one of these selves predominant, you forget the other selves to a surprising extent and act as if the brain only had access to the information banks of the presently predominant self. E.g., when frightened into infantile Oral states, you may actually think I am always a weakling, quite forgetting the times when your Anal Dominator self was in charge, or the Semantic or Sexual imprints were governing the brain, etc.

Punishment, discipline, obedience—these are the keys to such mysteries, and to the mystery of war itself, and to all oddities of behavior in Man and the other domestic animals. Sade saw it, and was banned for 150 years. He saw the genital fever, the need for embrace, dammed up at the center of man. Another reason he was banned.

Science does not limit human behavior to either genetics or "free will." Although they may use other terminology, most current psychologists would agree in general, I think, with Dr. Tim Leary's notion that all behavior (Gay or straight, "mental" or "emotional," "crazy" or "sane") results from a synergy of (1) genes, (2) early imprinting, (3) conditioning, (4) school-and-other learning, and (5) blind circumstance.

To the extent that we remain conscious of this process of superimposing structure (programming our emic reality) we will behave liberally and will continue learning throughout life. To the extent that we become unconscious of this process, we will behave Fundamentalistically or Idolatrously and will never again learn anything after the hour at which we (usually unconsciously) elevate a generalization into a dogma and stop thinking.

These Rationalist robots are also very uncomfortable with the newer circuits — and some of them spend most of their lives writing articles and books devoted to "proving" that the newer circuits do not exist and that all scientists who have recorded the behavior of these newer circuits are liars, fools, bunglers, charlatans or some manner of Damned Heretics.

Jan Huizinga, a Dutch sociologist, studied the game element in human behavior, and noted that we live by game rules which often have never risen to the level of conscious speech. In other words, we not only interpret data as we receive it, we also, quickly and unconsciously, fit the data to pre-existing axioms, or game-rules, of our culture (or our sub-culture).

The second, emotional-territorial circuit, creates a two-dimensional social space in conjunction with first-circuit advance-retreat.

I also feel strongly, as a libertarian philosopher, that burning Sheldrake's book is not the best way to seek an answer to such questions; and as a psychologist, I think I detect the familiar odor of primate panic behavior in the suggestion that it should be burned.

How about, you never act like a jerk when you're working," Jenn said. Jesse nodded. "It's why I work," he said.

We do much better," she said, "explaining why people did things than we do at predicting what they will do.

Not smoking gains in the area of lung cancer, but it loses badly in the realm of dramatic gestures.

There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them. Robert Benchley (1889-1945)

the birds scratch the seed out of the feeder, then fly down to the deck to eat the seed. They know there's a cat, but still they go down to pick at the seed. When you think about it, people are often like this, too.

A woman I know gave me a build-it-yourself bird-feeder kit for Christmas, so I built it, and hung it from the eve of my roof high enough to keep the birds save from my cat. But the birds scratch the seed out of the feeder, then fly down to the deck and eat the seed. They know there's a cat, but still they go down to pick at the seed. When you think about it, people are often like this, too.

nostrils flickered and twitched. Her breathing pattern changed when she sniffed for a scent. Sniffing wasn't breathing. The air she drew for sniffing did not enter her lungs. Sniffs were small sips she took in groups called trains. A train could be from three to seven sniffs, and Maggie always sniffed in threes. Sniff-sniff-sniff, pause, sniff-sniff-sniff. Budress' dog, Obi, sniffed in trains of five. Always five. No one knew why, but each dog was different. Scott