Quotes About Behavior

Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others. On a large scale, power is the capacity to set the public agenda—to frame big choices, to influence legislators, and to get laws enacted or prevent them from being enacted, to assert one's will on the world.

we aim for the practice of Christianity in their everyday life and dealings, and not merely the profession of its theology on Sundays.

Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

Road rage is the expression of the amateur sociopath in all of us, cured by running into a professional.

Psychologists now recognize that the need in some people to have a dozen cats is really a sublimated desire to have two dozen cats.

Doing one fool thing after another is not so terrible when you consider the human proclivity to do several fool things at once.

A cat, after being scolded, goes about its business. A dog slinks off into a corner and pretends to be doing a serious self-reappraisal.

Man is the only trained animal who expects his reward before he does his trick.

Are we marionettes, or are we creatures of free will who just happen to have a lot of jerky reflexes?

There is in all animals a sense of duty that man condescends to call instinct.

[T]he devil... seldom leads people astray anymore, finding it easier to just follow along in their footsteps.

[T]he way he treats his body, you'd think he was renting.

A large part of what we identify as our personality is in fact a distorted view of who we really are due to the type of behavioral defenses we adopted to fit the role or roles we were forced to assume according to the dynamics of our family system.

But we cannot integrate Spiritual Truths into our day-to-day human existence, in a way which allows us to substantially change the dysfunctional behavior patterns that we had to adopt to survive, until we deal with our emotional wounds. Until we deal with the subconscious emotional programming from our childhoods.

When they are at Rome, they do there as they see done.

Why doth one man's yawning make another yawn?

The first value of software—behavior—is urgent but not always particularly important. The second value of software—architecture—is important but never particularly urgent.

Software has two types of value: the value of its behavior and the value of its structure. The second of these is the greater of the two because it is this value that makes software soft.

Programming is an act of creation. When we write code we are creating something out of nothing. We are boldly imposing order upon chaos. We are confidently commanding, in precise detail, the behaviors of a machine that could otherwise do incalculable damage. And so, programming is an act of supreme arrogance. Professionals

We are confidently commanding, in precise detail, the behaviors of a machine that could otherwise do incalculable damage. And so, programming is an act of supreme arrogance.

If your function must change the state of something, have it change the state of its owning object.

If you are not holding back some energy in reserve, if you don't have a new plan, if you aren't going to change your behavior, and if you are reasonably confident in your original estimate, then promising to try is fundamentally dishonest. You are lying. And you are probably doing it to save face and to avoid a confrontation.

Software is a compound word. The word "ware" means "product." The word "soft" means easy to change. Therefore, software is a product that is easy to change. Software was invented because we wanted a way to quickly and easily change the behavior of our machines. Had we wanted that behavior to be hard to change, we would have called it hardware.