Quotes About Behavior

The rules were just different back then, especially in regard to corporal punishment. Not only could you hit your own children, but you could also hit other people's.

When young, the animals were sweet. Then one day they became moody and violent, like human teenagers

It had nothing to do with changing people—forget that, on a good day you're lucky if you can talk someone into changing their socks.

I'm now told that this is not called 'going to sleep' but rather 'passing out,' a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgement.

Before you do something questionable," Roger continued, as he had countless times before, "ask yourself, 'What if everybody did what I'm about to do?

one of the first signs of a self-destructing aboriginal culture always seems to be an increase in the use of drugs and intoxicants

it. But taking that route never gets you anywhere; you get trapped in an eternal round of massacres and counter massacres. It's only after you break the cycle and create strong groups—nations—that enforce the laws and demand some sort of international standard of acceptable behavior, that things start to improve.

Normal Iraqi etiquette was forgotten the moment drivers sat behind the wheel.

Modesty's no credit to anyone-it's just a social grace.

She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.

The line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people's litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction.

I do not permit blasphemy, the F-word, or obscenities such as soy milk at my table. Consider yourself chastised.

People who were perfectly sane on Tuesday sometimes go nuts on Wednesday.

But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern

Change becomes a habit and habits are hard to change. I

The behavior of the pigeon is beyond reproach, but the mountain cuckoo?

But you are what you do, not what you say you are.

Cutthroat trout display behavior more like brook trout than their rainbow trout cousins. They are most often found in quiet current tongues along undercut banks, under rock ledges and deadfalls, and in slow, deep pools. The cutthroat is often easily fooled, and its curiosity about big, bushy flies with bright colors and tinsel is legendary. They like to chase their prey and are suckers for large, rubber-legged dry flies slapped on the water and twitched.

All kinds of daily interactions would be altered if we suspended our insufficiently informed conclusions over why others act the way they do.

Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting.

The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: 'To give them no excuse.

Then they act and do things accordingly.

I do think art can and often does offer models of behavior, or at least suggests possibilities of behavior, but I dislike the aspirational tone of 'role model.' Roth's gift with Portnoy was large precisely because it had no aspirational element and no precise directions. Like any good gift, the less strings we find attached to it the better. The offer was not: You, too, can be like Portnoy. The offer was: Portnoy exists! Be as you please.