Quotes About Behavior

Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes.

I don't think that the average person is sixty percent good and forty percent prick. I think that the average person sometimes kids himself that he's the center of the universe, and it's okay if he does something that he'd be pissed about if someone else did it to him, and tries not to think about it too hard.

When I forget to do the dishes, that's because no one's perfect. When you forget to do the dishes, it's because you're a selfish asshole.

Belief overflows to behavior. First we need to change what we believe. when we truly change what we believe, we'll gladly change how we behave.

As you'll recall, what you believe — about who you are and who God is — determines how you behave. If you believe everybody is going to criticize you, you'll behave cautiously. If you believe you're probably going to fail, you're going to venture out tentatively. If, however, you believe that the one true Lord God is calling you, empowering you, leading you, and equipping you, then you will live boldly. Why? Because boldness is behavior born of belief.

But I should note, for all my resistance to organized religion, that I don't believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it. It provided him with a way to structure his behavior, and a way to explain that behavior, both past and present, to himself. Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events? -- and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

He didn't put it in these terms, and I'm not even sure if he knew this was what he was saying, but his message was: Act like a guy. It was a message that turned out to be invaluable.

No pervs allowed in the Oval Office," Donald said. "I didn't make the rules.

Easterners didn't really care? Niceness for its own sake wasn't a virtue to them.

That Mark's a pediatric cardiologist mostly offsets—to me, if not to everyone—how he's also kind of an asshole.

He would behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself completely to anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal to him. It was despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution.

Why, what have I done to the children, I should like to know? But they're like yourself; you've put 'em up to your own tricks and nasty ways—you've learned 'em in it, you 'ave.

O the stale old dogs who pretend to guard the morals of the masses, how smelly they make the great back-yard wetting after everyone that passes.

The power paradox is this: we rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst. We gain a capacity to make a difference in the world by enhancing the lives of others, but the very experience of having power and privilege leads us to behave, in our worst moments, like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths.

you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry

Control your temper. Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don't wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.

But what do average people do? The exact opposite. If they don't like a thing, they bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say nothing.

There you are; human nature in action, wrongdoers, blaming everybody but themselves. We are all like that.

Remember that tomorrow when you are trying to get somebody to do something. If, for example, you don't want your children to smoke, don't preach at them, and don't talk about what you want; but show them that cigarettes may keep them from making the basketball team or winning the hundred-yard dash.

Little phrases such as "I'm sorry to trouble you," "Would you be so kind as to—?" "Won't you please?" "Would you mind?" "Thank you"—little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life—and, incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

What has habit been doing to me?

Good manners," said Emerson, "are made up of petty sacrifices.