Quotes About Behavior

Beliefs about how lying looks are plentiful and often contradictory: depending on whom you choose to believe, liars can be detected because they fidget a lot, hold very still, cross their legs, cross their arms, look up, look down, make eye contact or fail to make eye contact.

Obama's view of the tax code is inherently political: Whom can we hit next? Energy companies, jet owners, bankers? Instead, the question should be how to promote economic efficiency by raising revenue without trying to manipulate corporate or personal behavior.

There have been many people whom I have admired, emulated and even modeled parts of my life after. I study how they do things, and then I go through a period of 'trying on' those same thinking patterns and behaviors. After awhile, what is not essentially me falls away while the useful parts remain.

Those whose character is mean and vicious will rouse others to animosity against them.

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Why do you not practice what you preach.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

Why does this person who is sitting behind a desk and never watches cartoons is arguing about what cartoons should be like. Its so creepy realizing that this person is a lunatic.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn't matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

Identity is part of drama to me. Who am I, why am I behaving this way, and am I aware of it?

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?

Given the right set of circumstances any one of us could become dangerous - so why not show that in our programmes?

The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.

One of the secretaries at Atlantic Records caught me pinching one of the other secretaries on the butt one morning. She said, 'My, you sure are wicked.'

It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it?

Foolishness is indeed the sister of wickedness.

The gap between being a bad person and being a criminal is often wide.

The conversation of how you do a play is my favorite conversation in the whole wide world: what a play is, why it's different than anything else, the math of the way that human behavior has to be calibrated theatrically versus anything else.

It's widely accepted that it is reasonable for a government to use tax policy to change behaviour.

A small behavioral change can also lead to embracing a wider checklist of healthier choices.

The only thing wider than my family's mean streak is my family's cheap streak.

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.