Quotes about behavior (1141 quotes, page 12)

“When their propaganda lines up with their behavior in the real world it would be very foolhardy to ignore it.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with the Reuters War College (April 2017)

World

“The universe acts on us, we adapt to it, and the notions that we develop as a result, including the mathematical ones, are in a sense taught us by the universe. Evolution has selected those of our ancestors (both human and not) whose behavior and thought were consistent with the workings of the universe.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 3 “Four Psycho-Mathematical Arguments”, Chapter 4 “The Universality Argument (and the Relevance of Morality and Mathematics)” (p. 131)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

Sense , Mathematics , Universe

“[I]f suffering is bad for animals when we cause it, it is also bad for them when other animals cause it. That suffering is bad for those who experience it is not a human prejudice; nor is an effort to prevent wild animals from suffering a moralistic attempt to police the behavior of other animals. Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it, just as we have a general moral reason to prevent suffering among human beings that is independent both of the cause of the suffering and of our relation to the victims. The main constraint on the permissibility of acting on our reason to prevent suffering is that our action should not cause bad effects that would be worse than those we could prevent.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" The Meat Eaters http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/", The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2010

Bad luck , Suffering , Animals , Relation ships

“Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that they would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity; and they would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behavior, which is the preparation and introduction to morality.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 219-220
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Nature , Women , Men

“It first starts with an intrepid rat... that goes up to the toilet bowl of the Speaker, just as he's sitting down to do his business... Some readers who couldn't get past the first few pages... called it disgusting and upsetting, and I said, "Well, you're describing the behavior of Congress..."”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

"How The Rats Reformed The Congress" (2018)

Business , Past

“Any organization’s competitiveness, ability to adapt, and culture arise from the routines and habits by which the people in the organization conduct themselves every day. It is an issue of human behavior.”

Mike Rother (1958) American business academic

People

“It is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth.
This last statement becomes obvious enough when it is considered that the earth is what we all have in common, that it is what we are made of and what we live from, and that we therefore cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it. But I believe it goes farther and deeper than that. There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong. By some connection we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

The Unsettling of America (1977), Chapter Seven : The Body and the Earth

Strong , Relation ships

“Values that are expressed but that don't change behavior are not really values, they are lies that you tell yourself.”

Coraline Ada Ehmke technologist, activist, and transgender feminist

Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub https://where.coraline.codes/blog/my-year-at-github/ (July 5, 2017)

Change

“The primal and perennial work of social organization is not to fix the bounds of behavior as permanent lines, which would make all evolutionary process impossible, but to retrieve the vital balance every time some act, public or private, has upset it.”

Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) American philosopher

Vol. 3, p. 125
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1972, 1982)

Making love , Time

“I think we should be snorkeling and swimming on reefs. Because I think people only develop a passion for protecting things if they know what is at risk. I would hardly be one to say that we shouldn’t go near them. That said, its important to manage tourism properly. If you have a lot of people going onto reefs, stepping on reefs, collecting things from reefs, breaking corals off, or throwing anchors on top of reefs, that’s not good. It’s important to properly manage the numbers of people and their behavior when they’re in water. It’s also important to make sure that the hotels that support that tourism have good water treatment for the sewage that they release, and that they aren’t also feeding this large population of visitors critically important reef fish. That is ecologically sound tourism. But you can’t just let it develop willy-nilly. It has to be managed carefully. Otherwise, you end up with lots of people and not much reef.”

Nancy Knowlton (1949) American biologist

Source: Nancy Knowlton https://web.archive.org/web/20081008104046/http://www.smithsonianmag.com:80/specialsections/ocean-hall/atm-qa-200809.html (September 2008)

Support , People , Water , Thinking

“The world's problems are pressing in on us all. The scale and impact of human activities now affects a great portion of the global resources important to human welfare. These activities are putting growing, often destructive pressure on the global environment, pressure that appears likely to increase as human numbers swell toward the doubling of the world's population that evidently lies ahead. These pressures can spawn or aggravate conflict that. in a world with so much destructive weaponry, generates important national security problems. Great changes are necessary to help ensure a humane future for the generations to come.
Most of the world's scientific community and many people in the environmental movement are aware of the gravity of the problems. Yet despite sober warnings from these and other groups, in both the industrial and the developing world, re- medial efforts frequently appear powerless and ineffectual. The scientific community has not taken a sustained, powerful role in the public arena where this great cluster of issues is debated and where the problems must be resolved. There is much more that our community can contribute to assessment, warning, and proposals for new patterns of behavior.”

Henry Way Kendall (1926–1999) American physicist

Source: A Distant Light : Scientists and Public Policy (2000), Introduction, p. 1

Future , People , Help , Communication

“Writing is, therefore, both a form of compulsive behavior and, I frequently tell people, a self-induced form of mental illness. Those few writers who don’t start off by being a little nuts soon get that way as a direct result of their vocation.”

Larry Niven book N-Space

Tom Clancy, Introduction: The Maker of Worlds (p. 1)
Short fiction, N-Space (1990)

Way , Self-confidence , People

“The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called "conditioning."”

B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) American behaviorist

In operant conditioning we "strengthen" an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.
Science and Human Behavior (1953)

“The impulse to increase profits can blind men to risk, especially when those at risk are strangers. Society imposes rules on corporate behavior to protect public safety in the face of baser impulses. These rules require enforcement...”

David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author

Free Lunch (2007)

Men

“The fact is, as actors, everything we do, bad or good, is a contribution. To me, it is a positive thing to give people as wide a range of human behavior with some sense of understanding of that behavior or some clue to it. It may be a very small thing in terms of the problems that exist in the world, but it is a thing, and it's something I can do, and like to do—am thrilled to do actually.”

Grace Zabriskie (1941) American actress

Grace Zabriskie: Methodical Madness https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/grace-zabriskie-methodical-madness-42678/ (June 26, 2001)

Problem , Understanding , Sense , World

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system.”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"Restriction on Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society", paragraph 119
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

“In a nutshell, poor education, a poor culture (one that impedes people from operating effectively together), poor infrastructure, and too much debt cause bad economic results. The best results come when there is more rather than less of: a) equal opportunity in education and in work, b) good family or family-like upbringing through the high school years, c) civilized behavior within a system that most people believe is fair, and d) free and well-regulated markets for goods, services, labor, and capital that provide incentives, savings, and financing opportunities to most people.”

Ray Dalio (1949) American businessman

[Economic Principles – Why and How Capitalism Needs to be Reformed, April 5, 2019, lejourdapres.parlement-ouvert.fr, https://lejourdapres.parlement-ouvert.fr/uploads/decidim/attachment/file/308/Economic_Principles_-_Why_and_How_Capitalism_Needs_To_Be_Reformed.pdf] (quote from p. 5 of 42)

School , Family , Education , Bad luck

“I think the rewards for moral courage are promotion. ... Any institution gets the behavior it rewards. Now if the institution gets rotten, you can have a problem with this. It's happened to institutions, it's happened to corporations. It's why you have to be very alert to this to keep your personal and managerial integrity.”

James Mattis (1950) 26th and current United States Secretary of Defense; United States Marine Corps general

Interview with David Brooks on C-SPAN (9 June 2019), time code 48:00 https://www.c-span.org/video/?463748-1/defense-secretary-jim-mattis-discusses-military-career-leadership

Courage , Problem , Thinking , Personality

“I find all of our world society is operating exclusively in parts. We know this because the word synergy is unknown popularly and it is the only word that means “behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts.””

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

This proves that society does not even think that it has a need for such a word. This discloses that society does not think that there are behaviors of wholes unpredicted by the parts. It thinks statistics and probability are all that we need but if “probability” and “statistics” were of any power at all we could not have a stock market or gambling for we would know exactly how things are coming out and no one would bet against the probability.
1960s, Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game (1969)

World , Parting

“I don't want special protection for gays or transgender. I'm saying there should be protections for all dissident behavior and speech. Dissidents of every kind.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

In an interview about the book. " Camille Paglia on her controversial feminism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69rgLvitaYM" (at 10m35s), CBC News: The National on YouTube, 7 May 2017.
Free Women, Free Men (2017)

“Just as no one is quite so stupid as to nullify biology completely, so too does no one deny some flexibility in the translation of genes into complex behaviors.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Nurturing Nature", p. 152

Stupidity

“No serious student of human behavior denies the potent influence of evolved biology upon our cultural lives. Our struggle is to figure out how biology affects us, not whether it does.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Nurturing Nature", p. 152

“To illude: one of the most shameful behaviors that can belong to the human being.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Illudere: uno dei comportamenti più vergognosi che possano appartenere all'essere umano.
Source: prevale.net

“We are all human beings, the best of us a saint, but never a god. We can follow a saint's conduct and imitate his behavior, but it is unnecessary to worship him.”

Cheng Yen (1937) Taiwanese Buddhist nun

Source: Master of Love and Mercy: Cheng Yen, p. 7

God

“There is a big academic literature on under what conditions sanctions work and don’t work, on when they can change the behavior of targeted countries. And most times, they don’t work. That’s what the literature says.”

Michael McFaul (1963) American academic and diplomat

"Toward a “Grander Strategy of Containing Putin’s Russia”: Ambassador Michael McFaul on Engagement and Containment in a New Era of Great Power Competition" in The Yale Review of International Studies http://yris.yira.org/comments/5314 (June 2021)

Time , Country , Literature , Change

“I'm 100 percent for lifting sanctions on Russia, provided they change their behavior for why the sanctions were put in place. It’s just that simple.”

Michael McFaul (1963) American academic and diplomat

"Michael McFaul - The Frontline Interview" in PBS https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/michael-mcfaul/ (23 June 2017)

Change

“People always love expressing themselves, and they often pretend to be modest in their words, saying that they are no good at this or that. This is particularly common among friends. But even if people are actually modest, there is no benefit to their behavior.”

Bo Xilai (1949) former Politburo member of the Communist Party of China

Source: Excerpts of letter to his first wife (14 July 1975)

People , Love

“As a maid (in maid café), you have to be in your best behavior and always have the best customer service game on while smiling for the entire day and interacting with patrons.”

Angel Chooi Malaysian teacher, model, online streamer and cosplayer

Source: Angel Chooi cited in " The rise of maid cafés in Malaysia and why it’s actually kinda cool https://eksentrika.com/maid-cafe-malaysia-king-angel/" on Eksentrika.

Game , Smile

“Don’t you think that the irresponsible behavior of men is caused by women?”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Other Quotes by Pope John Paul II, Attributed
Source: John Paul II, as quoted by Nafis Sadik as quoted in Steve Bradshaw, "SEX and the HOLY CITY" http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/panorama/transcripts/sexandtheholycity.txt, “Panorama”, BBC News. (12-10-03).

Thinking , Women , Men

“We've seen a parade of multinational corporations, financial institutions, Hollywood actors, and even American sports superstars joining a shameless stampede to see who can pander most effectively to a regime that is the reigning world champion of predatory economic behavior, human rights abuses, and even genocide.”

Tom Tiffany (1957) American businessman and politician

Exclusive—Rep. Tom Tiffany: Time for U.S. to Recognize Reality by Recognizing Taiwan https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/12/02/exclusive-rep-tom-tiffany-time-for-u-s-to-recognize-reality-by-recognizing-taiwan/ (2 December 2021)

Sport , World

“Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 23

School

“There's more to do to stop the bad behavior by big entities in this space because there's so much money in this space. They aren't looking out for patients like they used to.”

Greg Walden (1957) American politician

Source: Exclusive–Greg Walden: Private-Equity ‘Scare Tactics’ Will Not Stop ‘Surprise Medical Bill’ Reform https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/13/exclusive-greg-walden-private-equity-scare-tactics-will-not-stop-surprise-medical-bill-reform/ (13 September 2019)

Money

“I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us... I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv

Dependency , Nature , Thinking , Children

“Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. xxxiv

Dependency , Children , Learning , Age