Quotes About Tendency

T]here remains [in some parts of the country] a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Govt. & Religion neither can be duly supported. Such indeed is the tendency to such a coalition, and such its corrupting influence on both parties, that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded agst.

It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good; and that this spirit is more apt to be diminished than promoted, by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it.

In retelling these events, I have fought against a tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly—basically to falsify him—in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

I think there are people that have very addictive personalities.

I am an addictive personality.

On the pro-vaccine side - and not everyone does this, but I saw it enough for it to make me really uncomfortable - is a tendency to accuse people who are wary of vaccination of being stupid and not understanding science.

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence.

There is no intrinsic tendency in gene pools for particular genes to increase or decrease in frequency. But when there is a systematic increase or decrease in the frequency with which we see a particular gene in a gene pool, that is precisely and exactly what we mean by evolution.

But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations.

The best thinking says 'the self' is a fiction (I have a piece about that), yet it's a fiction that we all believe, our most intimate experience. Maybe it's nothing more than our tendency to repeat. Maybe we repeat because when we do, we recognize the behavior and the familiarity is comforting. So the self is just the consolation of our tendencies.

Men are so constituted that every one undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.

The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man.

The other thing that happened was that we have a tendency to project our own weaknesses onto another woman. I don't think men do that particularly.

The essential tendency of life is toward happiness . . . . Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.

My mother was extremely controlled, sort of flawless. And I always tend to be a bit more hippie.

What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

Human nature is above all things lazy.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.

What we call human nature, is actually human habit.