Quotes About Behavior

It's in dramatic contrast to the behavior of the leaders of socialist regimes, from Cuba to Albania, who, when they came to power, immediately began acting as if their system would be around forever—ironically enough, considering they in fact turned out to be something of an historical blip.

Kandiaronk] swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

John Holloway, perhaps the most poetic of contemporary Marxists, once proposed to write a book entitled Stop Making Capitalism.50 After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it's really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn't be capitalism anymore. There would be something else.

a tacit cosmology in which the play principle (and by extension, creativity) is itself seen as frightening, while game-like behavior is celebrated as transparent and predictable, and where as a result, the advance of all these rules and regulations is itself experienced as a kind of freedom.

How is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts and as a result, end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral?

the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.

While ruthlessly aggressive toward other species, they are also unusually cooperative with their own kind. Ants from neighboring nests don't fight, as with other species,

I began to see this as a series of dilemmas nested like Russian dolls. Can today's SETI community agree on a policy about active SETI? Even if collectively forged and broadly ratified, would such an agreement actually control or change global behavior, as perceived from the outside? How would you get everyone to go along? Can human society in some sense agree on active SETI? Should we, as a species, cautiously try to hide our presence, or hopefully announce ourselves to the universe?

It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it: That's what gets results.

It was the strangest thing to me that Charlie Gaines was publishing all these Bible stories about love and kindness," said Klapper, "and he was the nastiest son of a bitch on the face of the earth.

The Tydings Committee eventually criticized McCarthy for his behavior and exonerated most of those attacked by him. McCarthy's accusations, it reported, "represented perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruths in the history of the Republic.

He was not what gentlemen usually thought a gentleman was.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Men often act knowingly against their interest.

Custom is the great guide of human life.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.

We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men's behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension.

The passion for philosophy, like that for religion, involves a certain danger. Although it aims to correct our behaviour and wipe out our vices, it may—through not being handled properly—end up merely encouraging us to carry on in directions that we're already naturally inclined to follow.

If only one can could know the essential natures of things, one might discover the ultimate reasons why they behave as they do: for the essential nature or essence of anything... if only it were truly adequate, all the behavioural properties of that thing must follow necessarily.

Nada es tan cierto como que los hombres se guían en gran medida por el interés y que aun cuando se preocupan por algo que trasciende de ellos mismos no llegan muy lejos;

Mind control of individuals, the general population and even assets of the Web is aimed at ensuring there are no surprises, maverick behaviour or situations and responses the Elite can't predict.

If you change the way data are used, it is perhaps hardly surprising that behavior in collecting those data changes—a feedback phenomenon of the kind we examine in detail in chapter

Male Amazon river dolphins will even insert thier penises in each other's blowholes in the only known example of nasal sex.* *I refuse to make the obligatory "blowjob" joke here. Science writing is very serious business.

Human sexual and social behavior shares some similaries with that of rodents, but has some important differences as well. It shows much greater variability and individuality, for example, and is less closely tied to the olfactory system. At present, it is tempting to speculate that those of us with cheatin' hearts might have differences in brain dopamine, vasopressin, or oxytocin signaling when compared to our more faithful friends who have adopted the prairie vole lifestyle.