Quotes About Behavior

interesting how much insight you could have into your own pathologies, and how little impact the insight would have on your underlying needs. Or on your behavior.

Treat me well, and I'll treat you better. Treat me badly, and I'll treat you worse.

Naomi, you think this is all an accident? It's a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.

It's hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism's survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted.

She wondered what it was about men that wed them more to a way of doing things than to achieving their ostensible goals.

People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there's just what you can do, and what you can't. Well, I could. And I was going to.

It's a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.

He sifted into Elaine's, drunk, Southern and insulting, but was ignored.

For me, the ability to listen carefully to another person's perspective, rather than summarily deciding what that person means, is in keeping with the behavior one expects of an elder. And the ability to understand what someone else is thinking is the foundation of stable social order.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land.

Notice that the curve falls steeply at the beginning and then gradually levels off. This reflects what might be called the "decreasing marginal disutility of losses.

We "design" human nature, by designing the institutions within which people live. So we must ask ourselves just what kind of a human nature we want to help design.

Seligman's discovery of learned helplessness has had a monumental impact in many different areas of psychology. Hundreds of studies leave no doubt that we can learn that we don't have control.

Philosophers talked a lot about how people should act toward one another, as members of a family, in relationships with friends and neighbors, as citizens of a city. Good behavior was part of being a worthwhile human being and a responsible citizen. But it generally was not a part of religious activities.

95% of the people who walk the earth are inert, Johnny. 1% are saints, and 1% are assholes. The other 3% do what they say they can do.

When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

The country is an amazing paradox. In other lands, when a man eats to his fullest day after day, that man becomes fat…sleepy…piggish. But in this land…it seems the more you have the more aggressive you become.

Sane men will often take a hint," Mr. Kenopensky said. "Crazy men rarely do.

It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber's day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother; it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime: the smell of cigarette smoke, the look of a double-edged razor reflected in a mirror, pants hung over a chair, certain curse words.

It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself: and yet if she'd hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he'd have had her arrested for assault.

One is that if women's sexuality in Africa wasn't under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren't subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn't have a pandemic.

Some people say you can't change behavior. But there is clear evidence to indicate that people can and do change behavior—sometimes dramatically—and that doing so often produces extraordinary results.

SOMEONE ONCE TRIED TO SUMMARIZE A PRINCIPLE IN Aristotle's epic work Poetics with these words: "Action is character." Now Aristotle was describing the elements of drama when he wrote his Poetics, so he didn't necessarily mean what I mean here. Still, his basic premise is true: we know what a person's character is by what he does.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle said, "Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way . . . you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.