Quotes About Behavior

Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn't much of one, but it was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was never to buy his own drinks. He

Well, that was another thing that hadn't changed. Some people pick their noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets.

who cursed and swore at him from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures' plans.

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

Thirty seconds into the conversation, and already he'd blown it. Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall,or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?

At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

Mom said that people are interested in birds only in as much as they exhibit human behavior - greed and stupidity and anger - and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human...I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds - of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world – spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss, and Mount McKinley – is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins." --Hey Nostradamus!

It's amazing how you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you.

Human beings are disgustingly predictable, and this is as true of psychopaths as it is of grandmothers.

Here we are, two of the world's experts on chimpanzee behavior, and we have no idea how to control this one animal." And he laughed bitterly. For the first time in my life I felt at a total loss. I had no idea what to do, no answer for him. I felt only dread for what the future might hold.

classic example of what we programmers call emergent behavior.

Modus operandi, or M.O., encompasses those actions necessary to accomplish the crime.

It's hard to learn manners on the Internet.

It's not like Father to be late

Animal behaviorists have noted again and again that predatory species often kill when they have no desire to eat. They are killing because the instinct to kill is very strong.

Our capacity for violence is greater, but not necessarily our desire.

Toward the end Jennie and I had quite a bit of trouble. The inconsistent and chaotic atmosphere in the Archibald home was starting to take its toll. Jennie became very disobedient. She picked up a lot of Mrs. Archibald's ways. Very aggressive.

Criticism is a profession which allows one a certain license to be vicious outside the bounds of normal civilized behavior.

We compared the domesticated dog with the hyena

If the murder rate that Jane Goodall saw among the several dozen chimpanzees she studied in Gombe were extrapolated to New York City, for example, there would be over fifty thousand murders a year there. "Man is the only animal that kills for pleasure" you hear people say. What poppycock!