Quotes About Behavior

Anyone with a lifelong guilty conscience is likely to be a hair-splitting moralist, especially when it comes to other people's behavior.

I've seen a film in which Dr Lorenz pointed out the difference between two colonies of cattle egrets, one free and one caged. The free ones, who had to provide for themselves, were monogamous and energetic and kept their numbers within ecologically reasonable limits. The captive egrets were promiscuous, idle, overbreeding and presumably going to hell fast.

If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behaviour is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture.

A moral code was good for the Chinese whose inferior natures required such artificial means of restraint.

You know a man," Papa had always said, "by his anger.

All the books warned that behavioral changes in early teens could be sudden and extreme, but the intensity of Benny's distress scared her. He acted spooked, haunted.

I was slowly discovering that if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.

The trouble with psychology, said Wexford epigrammatically, 'is that it doesn't take human nature into account.

Stanley was affable, even considerate.

Such behaviours weren't the reasons parents abused children but the results of abuse.

No one gets drunk in order to raise their moral standards.

However, man when he is alone is usually more 'human' than when he is a member of a crowd, an excited mass. Individually we are wiser and better, less inscrutable. Becoming part of a group can change the same quiet, friendly individual into a devil.

Mille poolest kultuurid üksteisest erinevad? Esmajoones tavade poolest. Ütle mulle, kuidas sa riietud, kuidas käitud, missugusi kombeid jälgid, missuguseid jumalaid kummardad, ja ma ütlen sulle, kes sa oled. Inimene mitte ainult ei loo kultuuri ega ela selles, inimene kannab kultuuri endas, inimene ongi kultuur.

Observing the behavior of individual fowl in a henhouse, we note that birds lower in rank are pecked by, and give way to, birds of higher rank. In an ideal case, there exists a linear order of rank with a top hen who pecks all the others. Those in the middle ranks peck those below them but respect all the hens above them. At the bottom there is a drudge who has to take it from everyone. (Adolf Remane, Vertebrates and Their Ways)

the measure of a person's disposition is this: how far is he from what he understands to what he does, how great is the distance between his understanding and his actions.

Testosterone rots the brain . . .

His grandmother had said to him once, smiling slightly, that if you compelled people to behave as if they believed something eventually all but the strongest-willed really did start to believe it, because it was easier on their pride than admitting every moment in the privacy of their soul that they were pretending.

Lucy: I don't understand men. Nettie: What is there to understand? If you feed 'em regular-like and give 'em a bit of 'sugar' now and then, they're easy enough. And if they don't behave, you just toss 'em out on their arses. That's what I always say.

She liked red wine but had no head for it and after two glasses became a different person, giggling, gesticulating, talking without stopping, interrupting others, and, always, wanting to dance.

The problem is not technological," he said. "And there is no technological solution to it. The problem is human, human nature in general, male human nature in particular

Crisis shines a very bright light on human behavior, leaves no shadows in which we can hide, and reveals, simultaneously, the worst of which we are capable and our better natures

But now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys. Now the doll was the original, the woman the representation. These living dolls, these stringless marionettes, were not just dolled up on the outside. Behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity.

Words are for word people. You are not a person of that type. Concern yourself only with deeds.

Boys," I mutter tolerantly across the years to Saleem-at-twenty-four, "will be boys.