Quotes about behavior
page 2

“Mirroring behavior. When a mark takes a drink from his water glass, so should you. When he smiles, so should you. Keep it subtle, rather than creepy, and it’s a good technique.”

Holly Black book Black Heart

Source: Black Heart

Smile, Drink, Water

“We humans are conflicted beings. Our beliefs don't always harmonize with our instincts, and our behavior doesn't always reflect our beliefs…. We wage war between the person we are and the person we hope to become.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

War, Hope, Personality

“There is no way to hold your own in a relationship and simultaneously accept rude behavior.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

Way

“All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Source: Disclosure

Problem

“Avery's tone was grand and high-pitched." And, since I've been hanging out with you, Dad's decided I'm on good behavior now."
"Poor oblivious bastard," murmured Christian.”

Richelle Mead Blood Promise

Source: Blood Promise

“Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Life, Mood, Understanding, Parting

“I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter. It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I like maxims that don't encourage behavior modification.
-Calvin”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

19 Jan 91
Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons
Source: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.”

Orson Scott Card book Empire

Source: Empire

Parent, Time

“Everyone wants to know why customer service has gone to hell in a handbasket. I want to know why customer behavior has gone to hell in a handbasket.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Hell

“Racism is taught in our society… it is not automatic.
It is learned behavior toward persons with
dissimilar physical characteristics.”

Alex Haley (1921–1992) African American biographer, screenwriter, and novelist

Learning, Personality

“The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.”

Paulo Freire book Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 1, on the oppressed

“Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Disease, Error, Feeling, Fish

“Okay…' I hurried on. 'But why me?'
'You're a girl,' Lockwood called. 'Aren't you supposed to be more sensitive?'
'To emotions, yes. To nuances of human behavior. Not necessarily to secret passages in a wall.'
'Oh, it's much the same thing.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Screaming Staircase

Source: The Screaming Staircase

Secret, Girl

“LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

Attributed to Leary by Terence McKenna in one of his talks ( "The World and Its Double" https://terencemckenna.wikispaces.com/The+World+And+Its+Double, 11 September 1993, Nature Friends Lodge, Sierra Madre, CA), though he also stated[citation needed] Leary denied ever having said it. <br class="br">Misattributed

People

“I hate the way, once you start to know someone, care about them, their behavior can distress you, even when it's unreasonable and not your fault, even if you were really trying to be careful, tactful.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Wolf Star

Hate, Way

“What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior.”

Scott Turow book Limitations

Source: Limitations

Age, Suicide, Personality

“There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book The Summer Tree

Source: The Summer Tree

Lie, Understanding, Reality

“Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Decision

“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”

Robert B. Cialdini (1945) American social psychologist

Source: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

People, Success

“We are not philosophers, we are sovereigns. The rules that govern our behavior are not the rules for other men, and our honor, I think, is a different thing entirely, difficult for anyone but the historians and the gods to judge.”

Megan Whalen Turner book A Conspiracy of Kings

Source: A Conspiracy of Kings

Men, God, Thinking

“We create our fate every day… most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Fate, Suffering

“If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there's no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.”

Anthony Swofford book Jarhead

Source: Jarhead

Love, People, Disappointment, Hurt

“All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Fear, Beauty, Hope, Color

“My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I'm quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Final Empire

Books, Reading

“Weird behavior is natural in smart children, like curiosity is to a kitten.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

Children, Nature

“The study of doctrine and the teaching of doctrine will change behavior more than the study of behavior will change behavior.”

Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015) American Mormon leader

Study, Change

“When a nice girl overcompensates,
her behavior says, “What I have to offer isn’t enough,
and who I am isn’t enough.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

Girl

“Being myself includes taking risks with myself, taking risks on new behavior, trying new ways of 'being myself', so that I can see who it is I want to be.”

Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer

Way

“I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Hope, Time

“if i repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. what demon possessed me that i behaved so well?”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

“However difficult it may be to accept what happens to us, one must understand that moments such as this give us the possibility for radical change in our behavior.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Warrior of the Light

Understanding, Change

“You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

People, Learning

“Or - perhaps - I should just worry about my own behavior and let others be who they are.”

Louise Penny (1958) Canadian woman writer

“The way of the miracle-worker is to see all human behavior as one two things: either love, or a call for love.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Love, Way

“What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Source: Microserfs

Animals

“When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

People, Feeling, Hurt

“I'm not sure that insecurity is a good enough excuse for that sort of behavior. We're all insecure, and I really think he's old enough to have discovered the reasons behind his insecurity, and do something about them."

… Lucy”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Thinking

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching — even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

Presumably a paraphrase of "A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct" or of "Hunting for sport is an improvement ..." above.
Unlikely to be by Leopold, who knew that ethics involves not only doing the right thing, but also determining the right thing in the face of competing desirable criteria.
Misattributed

“Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“True repentance involves a change of heart and not just a change of behavior.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Change, Heart

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

People

“The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Walden and Other Writings

Soul, Parting

“Rationally speaking, blaming one's behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.”

Graham Joyce book Some Kind of Fairy Tale

Source: Some Kind of Fairy Tale

Alcohol

“What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Love

“Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1960s-1970s, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969, p. 53.

Time

“If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior… you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

People, Communication, Change

“And so, surpassing my own records for dangerous, reckless behavior, I ripped off Sonya's bracelet.
"I'm Rose Hathaway.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Idea

“Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act. They react to the problems, pains, lives, and behaviors of others. They react to their own problems, pains, and behaviors.”

Melody Beattie (1948) American writer

Source: Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

Pain, Problem

“And now, Anubis, I find you in this den of iniquity, this morass of questionable behavior, this… this--'

'School?”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

School, Question

“I hate rude behavior in a man,' he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. 'I won't tolerate it.' He politely tipped his hat, and rode away.”

Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove

Source: Lonesome Dove

Hate

“My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior -- BEFORE the Reformation.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

“The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Source: Sexuality and the Psychology of Love

Life

“My behavior is a product of my own conscious choices based on principles, rather than a product of my conditions, based on feelings.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Feeling

“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

Robert Conquest (1917–2015) poet and historian from England and the United States

Secret

“If you can understand human behavior, it can’t hurt you nearly as much.”

Carol Plum-Ucci (1957) American writer

Source: What Happened to Lani Garver

Understanding, Hurt

“Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.”

Sidney Poitier book The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

Source: The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

People, Way, Forgiveness

“The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Men, World, Nature, Change

“It is true that behavior cannot be legislated, and legislation cannot make you love me, but legislation can restrain you from lynching me”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Speech delivered in Finney Chapel at Oberlin College (22 October 1964), as reported in "When MLK came to Oberlin" by Cindy Leise, The Chronicle-Telegram (21 January 2008)
Variant: It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
Wall Street Journal (13 November 1962), Notable & Quotable , p. 18
1960s
Context: It is true that behavior cannot be legislated, and legislation cannot make you love me, but legislation can restrain you from lynching me, and I think that is kind of important.

Love

“The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: Chapter 1 : 'The Beauty Myth', p. 14

Beauty, Appearance

“I knew there was never anyone to blame when people get into drugs. They're always responsible for their own behavior, and it's not the dealer, and it's not the friend, it's not the childhood.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue, 2004

People, Childhood

“The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

God

“When girls walk home we put on lippy and makeup. We chat. Sometimes we pretend to be hunchbacks. But that is it. Perfectly normal behavior.”

Louise Rennison (1951–2016) British writer

Source: On the Bright Side, I'm Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God

Home, Girl

“You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

People, Change

“The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.”

Fannie Flagg (1944) American actress, comedian and author

Source: Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Life

“Can you ever get off for good behavior?" he joked.
I gave him what I hoped was a seductive smile as I found my seat. "Sure," I called over my shoulder. "If I was ever good.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Smile, Hope

“To give your positive or negative attention to something is a way of giving energy. The most damaging form of behavior is withholding your attention.”

Masaru Emoto (1943–2014) Japanese writer

Source: The Hidden Messages in Water

Way

“There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Pain, Joy

“So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Secret Life of Prince Charming

Love, Way

“To get along with God,
Consider the consequences of your behavior.
Earthseed: The Books of the Living”

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) American science fiction writer

God, Books

“A lady should never feel anxious about her behavior. The status is bred in the bone. To show anxiety is to lower oneself. Anxiety is.”

Eloisa James (1962) American academic

Source: A Kiss at Midnight

Feeling

“This behavior may… counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl, Interrupted”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Feeling, Girl

“Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Feeling, Thinking

“All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.”

E.M. Forster book Where Angels Fear to Tread

Source: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Life, Education, Parent, Dependency

“Audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at "good taste" of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That’s what they go to burlesque for.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

“The difficulty in defining a field for the so-called institutional economics is the uncertainty of meaning of an institution. Sometimes an institution seems to mean a framework of laws or natural rights within which individuals act like inmates. Sometimes it seems to mean the behavior of the inmates themselves. Sometimes anything additional to or critical of the classical or hedonic economics is deemed to be institutional. Sometimes anything that is "economic behavior" is institutional. Sometimes anything that is "dynamic" instead of "static," or a "process" instead of commodities, or activity instead of feelings, or mass action instead of individual action, or management instead of equilibrium, or control instead of laissez faire, seems to be institutional economics.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: "Institutional Economics," 1931, p. 648

Law, Feeling, Nature

“The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul, is somehow the offspring of resistance — of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1956)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Beauty, Soul, Thinking, Effort

“Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

The Pragmatics of Patriotism (1973)

“What this book is about is a kind of analysis that is characteristic of a large part of the social sciences, especially the more theoretical part. That kind of analysis explores the relation between the behavior of individuals who compromise some social aggregate, and the characteristics of the aggregate.These situations, in which people's behavior or people's choices depend on the behavior or choices of other people, are the ones that usually don't permit any simple summation or extrapolation of the aggregates. To make that connection we usually have to look at the system of interaction between individuals and their environment, that is, between individuals and other individuals or between individuals and the collectivity.”

Thomas C. Schelling (1921–2016) American economist

Micromotives and Microbehavior (1978).

People, Books, Science, Parting

“But business cycles as a subject for study have enjoyed a revival for at least a decade now, stimulated in part by the severity of the 1974-75 and 1981-82 recessions and in part by the intellectual ferment surrounding the development of the "equilibrium business cycle model" and the attention paid to the seminal work of Robert E. Lucas, Jr., contained in his book Studies in Business Cycle Theory (1981). Indeed, there is no longer any need to lament the passing of economics courses explicitly carrying the title "Business Cycles," since the topic of business cycle behavior and analysis has so infiltrated courses carrying the title "Macroeconomics" that the two subjects have become almost interchangeable. 2 In this light it is fitting that the major research program of the NBER in this area is called "Economic Fluctuations" rather than "Macroeconomics."”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The American Business Cycle, 1986, p. 2

Books, Business, Study, Light

“Neoclassical economic theory forms the central discourse and behavioral model of contemporary management education. Drawing on research and insights from game theory and behavioral economics we have argued that many of the core assumptions underlying this model are flawed. While we cannot say that the widespread reliance on the Homo economicus model has caused the highly level of observed managerial malfeasance, it may well have, and it surely does not act as a healthy influence on managerial morality. Students have learned this flawed model and in their capacity as corporate managers, doubtless act daily in conformance with it. This, in turn, may have contributed to the weakening of socially functional values and norms like honesty, integrity, self-restraint, reciprocity and fairness, to the detriment of the health of the enterprise. Simultaneously, this perspective has legitimized, or at least not delegitimized, such behaviors as material greed and optimizing with guile. We noted that this model has become highly institutionalized in business education. Fortunately, we believe that the potential for moving away from this flawed model is significant and thus can end this chapter on a more optimistic note for the future of business education.”

Rakesh Khurana (1967) American business academic

Herbert Gintis and Rakesh Khurana. " What Happened When Homo Economicus Entered Business School https://evonomics.com/what-happens-when-you-introduce-homo-economicus-into-business/," in: evonomics.com, July 14, 2016.

Health, Education, Game, Optimism

“To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do: whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Diary of Lady Murasaki

trans. Richard Bowring
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Women, People, World, Feeling

“General systems theory is a series of related definitions, assumptions, and postulates about all levels of systems from atomic particles through atoms, molecules, crystals, viruses, cells, organs, individuals, small groups, societies, planets, solar systems, and galaxies. General behavior systems theory is a subcategory of such theory, dealing with living systems, extending roughly from viruses through societies. A significant fact about living things is that they are open systems, with important inputs and outputs. Laws which apply to them differ from those applying to relatively closed systems.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Miller (1956) "General behavior systems theory and summary". In: Journal of Counseling Psychology. 3 (2) 120-124. Cited in: Francis Ferguson (1975) Architecture, cities and the systems approach. p. 12

Law

“Every organism represents a system, by which term we mean a complex of elements in mutual interaction. From this obvious statement the limitations of the analytical and summative conceptions must follow. First, it is impossible to resolve the phenomena of life completely into elementary units; for each individual part and each individual event depends not only on conditions within itself, but also to a greater or lesser extent on the conditions within the whole, or within superordinate units of which it is a part. Hence the behavior of an isolated part is, in general, different from its behavior within the context of the whole… Secondly, the actual whole shows properties that are absent from its isolated parts.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

As cited in: D.C. (1969) "Systems Theory — A Discredited Philosophy". in: Abacus V. p. 4
1950s, Problems of Life (1952, 1960)

Life, Parting, Dependency

“The armature of economic neo-liberalism … cannot concede any space to the idea of counter-conduct; counter-conduct becomes inconceivable, since conduct as such is a concept fully integrated into a scientific-epistemological field. Regime of veridiction, homo oeconomicus, rational behavior, ethical and political neutralization – such is the scheme, for instance, of American neo-liberalism. In this setting, counter-conduct is nothing more than a form of irrationality, just as in the history of psychiatry, it is but a form of abnormality.”

Arnold Davidson (1955) American academic

"In praise of counter-conduct," History of the Human Sciences, v. 24, n. 4

History, Idea

“Rat and behavioral psychology … mirror the actual inhumanity of reality. Rat psychology is human psychology where a total society has trained human beings to be creatures of stimulus and response, i. e. rats. “Insofar as the hardening of society has reduced men more and more to objects,” wrote Adorno, “methods which convey this are no sacrilege. … The method serves freedom in that it wordlessly testifies to the prevailing unfreedom.” Or, as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in another context: “The usual objection that empirical social research is too mechanical, too crude, and too unspiritual [ungeistig] shifts the responsibility from that which science is investigating to science itself.” … The idealistic misconception of … behavioral methods … shifts the evil from the social conditions that coerce men and women into standardized roles onto the social science that is merely registering these conditions.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 69

Women, Men, Reality, Freedom

“Refactoring (noun) : a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing the observable behavior of the software.
To refactor (verb) : to restructure software by applying a series of refactorings without changing the observable behavior of the software.”

Kent Beck (1961) software engineer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 33-43 as cited in: Militiadis Lytras, Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos, Ernesto Damiani (2011) Semantic Web Personalization and Context Awareness. p. 111

Understanding, Change

“As a noun, design is the named (although sometimes unnamable) structure or behavior of a system whose presence resolves or contributes to the resolution of a force or forces on that system. A design thus represents one point in a potential decision space. A design may be singular (representing a leaf decision) or it may be collective (representing a set of other decisions).
As a verb, design is the activity of making such decisions. Given a large set of forces, a relatively malleable set of materials, and a large landscape upon which to play, the resulting decision space may be large and complex. As such, there is a science associated with design (empirical analysis can point us to optimal regions or exact points in this design space) as well as an art (within the degrees of freedom that range beyond an empirical decision; there are opportunities for elegance, beauty, simplicity, novelty, and cleverness).
All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Grady Booch (2006) " On design https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/gradybooch/entry/on_design?lang=en" cited in: Frank Buschmann, ‎Kevlin Henney, ‎Douglas C. Schmidt (2007) Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, On Patterns and Pattern Languages. p. 214

Beauty, Art, Optimism, Decision

“War is a mass phenomenon. To penetrate the basic causes of war, we must discern the factors which have made millions of people abandon their habitual modes of life, their occupations, and their moral concepts to participate in murder and destruction. We should therefore put greater stress upon the simple conscious and. subconscious impulses which rule the behavior of the masses.”

Eugene M. Kulischer (1881–1956) American sociologist

Source: Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947, 1948, p. 3

Life, War, People

“If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it if your speculation is wrong, for the behavior then becomes unnatural and worthy of condemnation. Better to stick resolutely to a philosophical position on human liberty: what free adults do with each other in their own private lives is their business alone. It need not be vindicated — and must not be condemned—by genetic speculation.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"So Cleverly Kind an Animal", p. 267
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

People, Business

“Children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences and that adolescents with disorganized families, such as the complainant, are even more prone to such behavior.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Hillary Clinton (1975) State of Arkansas V. Thomas Alfred Taylor affidavit as quoted in Did Hillary Clinton betray a criminal client? http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/01/opinion/callan-hillary-clinton/ CNN (2014/07/01). <br class="br">1970s

Children, Family

“I want, however, to conclude by calling attention to a less visible form of social action: norms of social behavior, including ethical and moral codes. I suggest as one possible interpretation that they are reactions of society to compensate for market failures. It is useful for individuals to have some trust in each other's word. In the absence of trust it would become very costly to arrange for alternative sanctions and guarantees, and many opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation would have to be, foregone.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Kenneth Arrow, “The Organization of Economic Activity: Issues Pertinent to the Choice of Market versus Non-market Allocation” (1969)
1950s-1960s

Failure

“One of the topics [on the show last week] was the murder of women in the Arab sector, what is referred to, unfortunately, […] as 'honor killing' and has nothing to do with [anything worthy of] honor. The guest in the studio was a woman who had 20 years of experience working for the sake of those same women who die for no good reason, a woman whose everyday job was a holy work for the sake of thousands of Arab women who need a voice that will shout out and cry out their cries. After she had accused the government and the police and everyone of incompetence, I asked her, in a somewhat aggressive manner, as it were, '[…] Where are we in all of this? Where are we Arab women to teach and discipline our sons that a man has no right over a woman? […]' During the commercial break, she got up and told me that I had to learn how to talk to Arabs because the tone that I adopted and the things that I said were said to gain approval from Jews. So I've come to tell you today that I haven't come for approval from you; that I haven't come for approval from anyone; and this is the message that I want you to digest very, very well. In my life I have been accused of many things: that I am the fifth column; that an Arab will always stay an Arab, no matter how liberal he may look; that I bring shame on my family for being in a relationship with a person outside my religion. I've received threats after asking Palestinian residents live on the show why they don't go out against Hamas men, who use them and bring them to their slaughter; I've been attacked on Yom ha-Shoah and Yom ha-Zikaron that the managers at Arutz 2 dared to put an Arab on a show such as that as the host on a day such as that; I've been told that I make Arab women stray off the path of proper behavior; and that I've forgotten where I come from being an 'Ashkenazified', 'Judaized' Arab. So they blamed and they talked—as if that, in itself, made them right.”

Lucy Aharish (1981) Arab-Israeli journalist

Source: Lucy Aharish's campus speech http://www.onlife.co.il/%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%95%D7%93%D7%94/%D7%9E%D7%A0%D7%94%D7%99%D7%92%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%99%D7%95%D7%9D-%D7%90%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%97%D7%A8/85312/%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%99-%D7%90%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%A9-%D7%9C%D7%90-%D7%91%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%99-%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%90-%D7%97%D7%9F-%D7%91%D7%A2%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%99-%D7%90%D7%A3-%D7%90%D7%97%D7%93 at "מנהיגות היום את המחר". Onlife. 9 November 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2015. Video available.

Life, Women, Men, Family