Quotes About Behavior

the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

We are, after all, homo economicus .

They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university? Evidently not

Hate the sin, love the sinner: it's hard to stay pissed off at someone for doing something wrong if you know you'd have done exactly the same thing if you'd been standing in their shoes.)

They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university?

and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads.

Good policy uses incentives to channel behavior toward some desired outcome. Bad policy either ignores incentives, or fails to anticipate how rational individuals might change their behavior to avoid being penalized.

Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things.

Statistical malfeasance has very little to do with bad math. Judgement an integrity turn out to be surprisingly important. A detailed knowledge of statistics does not deter wrongdoing any more than a detailed knowledge of the law averts criminal behavior.

Inflation of all kinds devalues everything it infects. It obscures information and so distorts behaviour.

We are what we do. If you want to change, you have to work at it. Change what you do. You have to repeat and reinforce. Over and over. Do the same thing again and again. Until it is you.

But if other people are irritable, we may divorce their behavior from their experiencing. We can't feel their experience; and so we judge their behavior. If we think, "She shouldn't be so arrogant," we only see her behavior and judge it, because we have no awareness of what is true for her

There was no sound from the cats. Unlike dogs and rattlesnakes, they don't warn you before they strike. They aren't gentlemen. That's one of the reasons why I like them.

It was quite obvious that without severe behavior modification, this boy would grow up to be a serial killer.

Why are babies allowed to cry when they wake up, but adults crying when they wake is frowned upon? Babies are permitted to act like assholes whenever they feel like it and no one blinks...

There's nothing more annoying than a man ordering wine at a bar when you're not eating.

If you are a drinker, always use a pseudonym when booking hotels. None of us really know what kind of mess we're going to leave behind, and there's no sense in getting banned from a resort you respect.

So you're a comedian, he said. Tell me something funny. Okay. The great thing about being an alcoholic is that when you're bored at a party, you can leave without saying good-bye, and people just think you blacked out. Are you an alcoholic? he asked me. That's not really the point, I responded. And I don't like the word 'alcoholic.' I like to think of myself as an advanced drinker.

Sometimes, we do things that are bad for us in an effort to cope with problems.

Pretty girls behave best when you ignore them. Of course, they have to know you are ignoring them, for otherwise they may not even know you exist.

I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself.

We are the only primates that can tap our foot or move our body in time with a specific rhythm. It's wired into us, but not into our chimp or gorilla cousins, which tells us that it is a trait that like language, big toes, and toolmaking evolved sometime over the past seven million years.

A situation in itself," he said, "is neither happy nor unhappy. It's only your response to it that causes your sorrow.