Quotes About Behavior

People did not respond to anger. They did not respond to demands. Silence and questions, these were far more effective.

You never could tell what a man would do when he was drunk, even if that man was your own self.

when what they do is hidden, men sometimes deal with strangers in ways they wouldn't if there were other eyes to see.

she knew that showing nerves could infect others with them.

What you practice too often, you use without thinking.

Why was it women could go to pieces or fly into a rage at the smallest thing, yet never flicker an eyelash at what left you gaping?

When a woman plays the fool, look for the man.

Men were so strange they were hardly human sometimes.

Shaking his head, he went back to studying the forest. Aiel or not, they were all alike in some ways. If the world is ending, a woman will want time to fix her hair. If the world's ending, a woman will take time to tell a man something he's done wrong.

Cadsuane had learned long ago to stop questioning the odd penchants of people with too much free time.

Being polite to a person is not a sign of respect for them, Pevara Sedai," Emarin said. "It is merely a sign of a good upbringing and a balanced nature.

The bar was also a reminder of an age when the upper middle classes poured enormous quantities of hard liquor down their throats at every occasion in which more than two people were in a room for more than three minutes.

We may feel less a part of a cohesive society today not so much because of all the outrageous behavior we see reported in our media but because we are deprived of an accompanying sense of collective offense in response to the outrageous behavior.

El hecho de evitar el dinero es tan psicótico como ser adicto a el.

Now anybody can be kind. And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class.

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior.

People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.

I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.

Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That's not generic prosociality. That's ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context—who you are, your environment, and who that person is.

In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes.

Words have power. They can save, cure, uplift, devastate, deflate, and kill. And unconscious priming with words influences pro- and antisocial behaviors.

Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.

In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions—religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit—bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.

Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture produce different brains. In other words, how culture and biology coevolve.3 See the role of ecology in shaping culture.