Quotes about behavior
page 3

“Preachers have created for us patterns of behavior unattainable for humans, they then left us chasing them as if we were chasing a dream”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Dreams

“It takes thousands of them to create an archive of human wisdom; only one to set a torch to it. Wouldn’t you have to say, then, that the work of the librarians is more typical of mortal behavior than the work of the arsonist?”

Kage Baker book The Children of the Company

Source: The Children of the Company (2005), Chapter 2, “Victor the Poisoner” (p. 89)

Wisdom

“There is no reason to assume that only those who finally commit a deviant act actually have the impulse to do so. It is much more likely that most people experience deviant impulses frequently. At least in fantasy, people are much more deviant than they appear. Instead of asking why deviants want to do things that are disapproved of, we might better ask why conventional people do not follow through on the deviant impulses they have. Something of an answer to this question may be found in the process of commitment through which the “normal” person becomes progressively involved in conventional institutions and behavior.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), pp. 26-27.

People, Question, Appearance, Personality

“If you put it as “complex nervous systems” it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry… to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked “What’s so special about humans…?”, I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point.
…I could pose the same kinds of questions of you… So God says, “You are guys are really, really special.” How does his saying it make us special? “But you see, he gave us a soul.””

Shelly Kagan (1956) American philosopher

How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… “What’s so special about that?”
Debate: Is God Necessary for Morality? (2011)

Love, God, Guy, Soul

“But I saw the relationship between people, I saw their thoughts, I saw their kind of expressionistic behavior in every difficult situation. I saw all the time the unclearness in the psychological condition of the people. You know, that was the time called the 'Roaring Twenties' and I felt that this expressionistic behavior, this unformed quality of soul power and emotion of life... I saw it, that it would lead to a kind of catastrophe. That was my general feeling.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1980's, Interview with Kate Horsefield, 1980, pp. 62-63; Also cited in: Video Data Bank, School/Art Institute Chicago, (1981) Profile, Volume 1

Life, People, Feeling, Soul

“Amid an extended, international discussion of sexual misconduct and female confession, it has occurred to me that sometimes it can be difficult for women to understand one another’s pain. We are often told that experiences of oppression are actually the result of the supposedly overwrought emotional set point of womanhood, a pressure that compels us to keep our stories to ourselves — or, in the worst of cases, to look upon each other’s stories with excessive scrutiny, behavior prescribed by the poison of internalized misogyny.”

Lauren Duca (1991) American journalist

Sexism, Remembered and Forgotten (November 17, 2017)

Women, Pain, Understanding

“It was Plato who determined once and for all the cultural meaning of imitation, but this meaning is truncated, torn from the essential dimension of acquisitive behavior, which is also the dimension of conflict. If the behavior of certain higher animals, particularly the apes, seems to foreshadow human behavior, it does so almost exclusively, perhaps, because the role of acquisitive mimesis is so important in their behavior, although it is not as central as it is for the human being. If one ape observes another reach for an object, it is immediately tempted to imitate the gesture. It also happens that the animal visibly resists the temptation, and if the imitative gesture amuses us by reminding us of human beings, the failure to complete it, that is to say the repression of what already can be nearly defined as a desire, amuses us even more. It makes the animal a sort of brother to us by showing it subject to the same fundamental rule as humanity—that of preventing conflict, which the convergence of two or several avid hands toward one and the same object cannot help but provoke.”

René Girard book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 4.

Failure, Help, Animals

“Nowhere have REH’s epistemological flaws and empirical disappointments been more apparent than in efforts to model financial market outcomes, which are largely driven by participants’ expectations. Beginning with Robert Shiller’s (1981) pathbreaking paper, research has shown that REH models are unable to explain the basic features of fluctuations and risk in stock markets. Likewise, in their magisterial work on the current state of international macroeconomics, Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff (1996: 625) concluded that “the undeniable difficulties that international economists encounter in empirically explaining nominal exchangerate movements are an embarrassment, but one shared with virtually any other field that attempts to explain asset price data.” The failures of REH explanations of aggregate outcomes gave rise to alternative approaches, most notably behavioral finance models. However, sober assessments even by the likes of Obstfeld and Rogoff did not dispel the faith of most economists that REH models would one day be able to explain financial market outcomes and macroeconomic performance.”

Roman Frydman (1948) American economist

"Which Way Forward for Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis?" 2013

Faith, Disappointment, Failure, Effort

“The words synergy (syn-ergy) and energy (en-ergy) are companions. Energy studies are familiar. Energy relates to differentiating out subfunctions of nature, studying objects isolated out of the whole complex of Universe—for instance, studying soil minerals without consideration of hydraulics or of plant genetics. But synergy represents the integrated behaviors instead of all the differentiated behaviors of nature's galaxy systems and galaxy of galaxies.”

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

105.00 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0100.html 1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Nature, Study, Universe

“I must also call your attention to the fact that it is crucial for my viewpoint that human behavior is to a large extent charged with a considerable amount of energy, but that in contrast to Freud I do not consider this energy to be sexual, but the vital energy within any organism which, according to biological laws, gives man the desire to live, and that means to adapt himself to the social necessities of his society. To go back to what I consider to be the misunderstanding, it has never been my position that society only deforms or manifests that which is already there. If we make the distinction between human necessities in general and human desires in particular then indeed, society creates particular desires which, however, follow the general laws of the necessities rooted in human nature.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)

Law, Nature

“Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Our Natural Place", p. 243
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Nature, Animals

“The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i. e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

Gene Amdahl, Gerrit Blaauw, and Fred Brooks (1964) "Architecture of the IBM System." in: IBM Journal of Research and Development Vol 8 (2) p. 87-101.

“I think everyone has what it takes to be a good actor innately within them. It’s really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person. You can’t become another person if you’re not self-aware; you wouldn’t know what’s changed. [But] the ability to play pretend is something that everyone has access to; you see little kids doing it. On the spectrum of imagination, there are people who are more imaginative than others—I guess some kids are hardcore pretenders and have imaginary friends for years and other kids play and they have fun, but it’s not quite as specific like that. I’m sure there’s a range, but I think everyone can pretend.”

Bryce Dallas Howard (1981) American actress

Bryce Dallas Howard https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/bryce-dallas-howard (February 10, 2017)

People, Imagination, Thinking, Change

“When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically … But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap, as quoted in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (1963) by Paul Arthur Schilpp, p. 25, and in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1991) by Ray Monk, p. 244

Pain, People, Art, Way

“A system in which a few things interacting produce tremendously divergent behavior; deterministic chaos; it looks random but its not.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Christopher Langton in: Roger Lewin (1990) Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos New York, Macmillan. p. 12

“Game theory is a theory of strategic interaction. That is to say, it is a theory of rational behavior in social situations in which each player has to choose his moves on the basis of what he thinks the other players’ countermoves are likely to be.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Game, Thinking

“The role of discourse in society is active; it not only re-confirms and re-enacts existing social relationships and patterns of behavior, it also renegotiates social relationships and introduces new meanings and new behaviors.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 2

“An ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 517

“The behavior of the economy as a whole, at the aggregate, macro-level, is built up from the individual equations at the micro-level.”

Paul Ormerod book The Death of Economics

Part I, Chapter 4, Professional Reservations, p. 79
The Death of Economics (1994)

“Man's position in the world is defined by the fact that in every dimension of his being and behavior he finds himself at every moment between two boundaries. This condition appears as the formal structure of our existence, filled always with different contents in life's diverse provinces, activities, and destinies. We feel that the content and value of every hour stands between a higher and a lower; every thought between a wiser and a more foolish; every possession between a more extended and a more limited; every deed between a greater and a lesser measure of meaning, adequacy, and morality.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The View of Life (1918), p. 1. Opening line of first essay "Life as Transcendence"

Life, World, Feeling, Appearance

“The basic managerial idea introduced by systems thinking, is that to manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Russell L. Ackoff and Fred Emery (1972) On purposeful systems, cited in: Lloyd Dobyns, Clare Crawford-Mason (1994) Thinking about quality: progress, wisdom, and the Deming philosophy. p. 40.
1970s

Idea, Thinking, Parting

“I think we're going to find some other things. And I think that when all of this is put into context, and we really look at the people involved here, look at their motivations and look at their backgrounds, look at their past behavior, some folks are going to have a lot to answer for.”

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

White House years (1993–2000) Source: "Hillary Clinton Threatens Bill's Accusers on Today Show" https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4604929/hillary-clinton-threatens-bills-accusers-today-show-jan-28-1998, C-SPAN, Interview with Matt Lauer (28 January 1998)

People, Motivation, Thinking, Past

“People get a sense that something is really wrong in government and in our culture. There is a corruption, not only in politics, but of spirit as well, when people are so quick to be violent with one another. I think everybody would like to be able to find a solution to make things better. We have the desire to reform inside of us, and we get frustrated because we don’t know how to change things, even if it comes to our own behavior. Sometimes you get frustrated because you don’t know how to stop that thing that you know is either hurtful to yourself or someone else.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview at Collider.com (6 February 2011) http://collider.com/jennifer-beals-interview-the-chicago-code/74802/.

People, Thinking, Sense, Change

“The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color-blind. This problem is simple: it believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above race. … We are led to believe that racism is prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups. If the state acts without prejudice (this is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new millennium.”

Vijay Prashad (1967) Indian historian and journalist

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2002), p. 38

Justice, Color, Problem, Past

“By believing we are the product of random acts, we eliminate morality and the basis of ethical behavior. For if there is no such thing as moral authority, you can do anything you want. You make everything relative, and there’s no reason for any of our higher values.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

As quoted in "Evolution? No" http://archives.adventistreview.org/2004-1509/story2.html, The Adventist Review (2004)

“For any given system, the environment is the set of all objects whose behaviour is influenced by the behaviour of the primary system, and those objects whose behaviour influences the behavior of the primary system.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Definition of System, 1956, p. 20 cited in: Baleshwar Thaku eds. (2003) Perspectives in resource management in developing countries. p. 54

“[Even the mechanism can be endowed with an image. Thus] the thermostat has an image of the outside world in the shape of information regarding its temperature. It has also a value system in the sense of the ideal temperature at which it is set. Its behavior is directed towards the receipt of information which will bring its image and its value systems together”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 22 as cited in: Robert A. Solo (1994) " Kenneth Ewart Boulding: 1910-1993. An Appreciation http://www.jstor.org/stable/4226892". In: Journal of Economic Issues. Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 1187-1200

World, Sense

“In our definition of system we noted that all systems have interrelationships between objects and between their attributes. If every part of the system is so related to every other part that any change in one aspect results in dynamic changes in all other parts of the total system, the system is said to behave as a whole or coherently. At the other extreme is a set of parts that are completely unrelated: that is, a change in each part depends only on that part alone. The variation in the set is the physical sum of the variations of the parts. Such behavior is called independent or physical summativity.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Definition of System, 1956, p. 23

Change, Parting, Dependency

“We are the citizens of this nation, and I feel it is our duty to discipline indecent behavior. It is out of this sense of duty that we feel the need to safeguard our culture.”

Pramod Muthalik (1963) Indian politician

As quoted in " Attack on women at a bar in India raises fears of 'Hindu Taliban' http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/29/world/fg-india-brawl29, Los Angeles Times (29 January 2009)

Feeling, Sense

“Loving truth and living honestly is my attitude to life. Be true to yourself and be true to others, thus you can be the judge of your behavior.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

As quoted in "Living legend: Ba Jin" in News Guangdong (26 November 2003)

Love, Life, Truth

“The research questions that motivate most quantitative studies in the health, social and behavioral sciences are not statistical but causal in nature. For example, what is the efficacy of a given drug in a given population? Whether data can prove an employer guilty of hiring discrimination? What fraction of past crimes could have been avoided by a given policy? What was the cause of death of a given individual, in a specific incident? These are causal questions because they require some knowledge of the data-generating process; they cannot be computed from the data alone.”

Judea Pearl (1936) Computer scientist

Pearl, Judea (2008) "Causal Inference," in: Pearl, Judea. The science and ethics of causal modeling. (2010).

Death, Health, Motivation, Question

“Around 1958, I became aware of H. A. Simon's seminal papers on bounded rationality and was immediately convinced by his arguments. I tried to construct a theory of boundedly rational multigoal decision making. Together with Heinz Sauermann, I worked out an "aspiration adaptation theory of the firm" which was published as a journal article in 1962… More and more I came to the conclusion that purely speculative approaches like that of our paper of 1962 are of limited value. The structure of boundedly rational economic behavior cannot be invented in the armchair, it must be explored experimentally.”

Reinhard Selten (1930–2016) German economist

"Reinhard Selten - Biographical," 1994

Decision

“A system of opinions which, being founded on a system of accepted values, determines the attitudes and behavior of men with respect to desired objectives of development of the society, social group or individual.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Adam Schaff (1967), "Functional Definition, Ideology, and the Problem of the 'fin du siècle' of Ideology." L’Homme et la Société, April-June 1967. pp. 49-61; p. 50

Men

“I interpret contemporary human social behavior to comprise hypertrophic outgrowths of the simpler features of human nature joined together into an irregular mosaic.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Nature

“It cannot be too frequently emphasized that the behavior of any animal must depend upon on the nature of the stimulus which it meets, its anatomic and physiologic capacities, and its background of previous experience. Unless it has been conditioned by previous experience, an animal should respond identically to identical stimuli, whether they emanate from some part of its own body, from another individual of the same sex, or from an individual of the opposite sex.”

Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) American scientist (1894–1956)

Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

Sex, Nature, Animals, Parting

“Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with it. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap (1937) cited in: Irving J. Lee (1967) The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics. International Society for General Semantics, p. 44

Truth, Law, Question, Sense

“Well, I want to start out that I was lucky in the ‘60s to also be taking a class in Classical Ethology by a professor named Tom Evans, where I learned that operant conditioning does not explain all animal behavior. He explained how fixed action patterns and hardwired instinctual behavior works. And I remember going on a visit to Dr. Skinner and I felt like I was visiting, you know, the grand temple of psychology. And I went up to his office and, you know, he seemed, I'm like, "oh, you mean he's actually an ordinary person?" And we got to talking and of course back then I wore a dress you know ‘cause, you know, ladies had to be, like, dressed up, and I had a very conservative dress on, and B. F. Skinner touched my legs.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Learning, Animals, Personality

“In any case there is an intense modern interest in machines that imitate life. The great difference between magic and the scientific imitation of life is that where the former is content to copy external appearance, the latter is concerned more with performance and behavior.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: An imitation of life (1950), p. 42.

Life, Appearance

“Perception creates behavior. Perception encourages behavior. And because this institution--this artifice--continues to socially reinforce patterns of perception and behavior, if this behavior is destructive, it may not be a bad idea to eliminate or curtail the institution.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 50

Idea

“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

Education, Teachers, Universe

“Addiction may be something to which some of us are predisposed, like diabetes, rather than a voluntary behavior — but it’s also reversible. A "disease model" of alcoholism and other addictions in no way diminishes our personal accountability once we know the facts. It simply suggests how hard recovery will be, and how much help we need.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"Can't Get Enough," New York Magazine (23 May 1998)

Alcohol, Disease, Way, Help

“[T]he psychic and physical characteristics of human beings, and the differences between individuals, are the consequence of an interaction between the genes that are present in the fertilized egg and the sequence of environmental circumstances that the developing organism experiences during its entire life history. With a few exceptions, like cystic fibrosis where possession of the defective genotype leads ineluctably to the disease, or language acquisition where the language spoken depends only on experience and not at all on genotype, human characteristics are all subject to this interaction of forces. There are, moreover, random events in cell growth and differentiation that are neither genetic nor environmental in the usual sense, and which play an extremely important part in development, especially in behavioral traits.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Genes and Sexuality: An Exchange (1995)

Life, Disease, History, Sense

“The physicist needs a facility in looking at problems from several points of view. The exact analysis of real physical problems is usually quite complicated, and any particular physical situation may be too complicated to analyze directly by solving the differential equation. But one can still get a very good idea of the behavior of a system if one has some feel for the character of the solution in different circumstances. Ideas such as the field lines, capacitance, resistance, and inductance are, for such purposes, very useful. … On the other hand, none of the heuristic models, such as field lines, is really adequate and accurate for all situations. There is only one precise way of presenting the laws, and that is by means of differential equations. They have the advantage of being fundamental and, so far as we know, precise. If you have learned the differential equations you can always go back to them. There is nothing to unlearn.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume II; lecture 2, "Differential Calculus of Vector Fields"; section 2-1, "Understanding physics"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Law, Way, Feeling, Idea

“As with infanticide, the sexual abuse of children is widely reported by anthropologists, but in positive terms. […] "This would not constitute 'abuse' if in that society the behavior was not proscribed". Like all other anthropologists who report the regular masturbating and sucking of children's genitals, he [L. L. Langness] calls this "love".”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: The Emotional Life of Nations (2002), Ch. 7, pp. 262-263 & 266.

Love, Children

“The further development of the open system thinking propounded by von Bertalanffy and Prigogine requires us to characterize the environments within which open systems are functioning. Four levels of environmental organization can be distinguished in terms of their causal texturing…
Coming out from an academic cocoon to work at the Tavistock Institute in London I found myself trying to comprehend the behavior of very large organizations in the face of very devastating winds of change… The conceptual developments in that paper have continued to play a considerable role in my subsequent thinking.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

F. E. Emery (1980) in " This Week’s Citation Classic http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1980/A1980KT80900001.pdf" in: CC. Nr. 52. Dec 29, 1980. p. 292: Emery reflecting on his 1963 article "The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments" with Eric Trist.

Thinking, Change

“Neither Watt's steam engine nor Whitney's standardized parts really started the Industrial Revolution, although each has been awarded that claim, in the past. The real start was the awakening of scientific and technological thoughts during the Renaissance, with the idea that the lawful behavior of nature can be understood, analyzed, and manipulated to accomplish useful ends. That idea itself, alone, was not enough, however, for not until the creation and evolution of blueprints was it possible to express exactly how power and parts were to be combined for each specific task at hand.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 16.

Law, Idea, Nature, Past

“Valued achievements connect to people at a deeper level—and a deeper level can change behavior that is generally very difficult to change.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Step 6, p. 130
The Heart of Change, (2002)

People, Change

“When a person tries to act in accordance with his conscience, when he tries to speak the truth, when he tries to behave like a citizen, even in conditions where citizenship is degraded, it won't necessarily lead anywhere, but it might. There's one thing, however, that will never lead anywhere, and that is speculating that such behavior will lead somewhere.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Introduction, p. xvi
Disturbing the Peace (1986)

Truth, Personality

“Motives, attitudes, and expectations of consumers and businessmen play a significant role in determining spending, saving, and investing and that modern psychology provides conceptual as well as methodological tools for the investigation of economic behavior.”

George Katona (1901–1981) American psychologist

George Katona, Psychological economics. Elsevier, 1975.

Motivation

“Now, consciousness. That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you’ll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse—an internal simulation of the mouse’s likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator’s actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling—so the tribe could work collectively—and then reflexively, to simulate the individual’s own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you’ve got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus—signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as ‘predator here’ or ‘food there.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), p. 397

Food, Way, Cats, Optimism

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law, Search, Fashion, Nature

“Months later, Roger Cohen would write in The New York Time that preventing an attack on Banja Luka was "an acto of consummate Realpolitik" on our part, since letting the Federation [of Bosnia-Herzegovina] take the city would have "derailed" the peace process. Cohen, one of the most knowledgeable journalists to cover the was, misunderstood our motives in opposing an attack on Banja Luka. A true practitioner of Realpolitik would have encouraged the attack regardless of its human consequences. In fact, humanitarian concerns decided the case for me. Given the harsh behavior of Federation troops during the offensive, it seemed certain that the fall of Banja Luka would lead to forced evictions and random murders. I did not think the United States should contribute to the creation of new refugees and more human suffering in order to take a city that would have to be returned later. Revenge might be a central part of the ethos of the Balkans, but American policy could not be party of it. Our responsibility was to implement the American national interest, as best as we could determine it. But I am no longer certain we were right to oppose an attack on Banja Luka. Had we known then that the Bosnian Serbs would have been able to defy or ignore so many of the key political provisions of the peace agreement in 1996 and 1997, the negotiating team might not have opposed such an attack. However, even with American encouragement, it is by no means certain that an attack would have taken palce - or, if it had, that it would have been successful. Tuđman would have had to carry the burden of the attack, and the Serb lines were already stiffening. The Croatian Army had just taken heavy casualties on the Sarva. Furthermore, if it fell, Banja Luka would either have gone to the Muslims or been returned later to the Serbs, thus making it of dubious value to Tuđman. There was another intriguing factor in the equation - one of the few things that Milošević and Izetbegović had agreed on. Banja Luka, they both said, was the center of moderate, anti-Pale sentiment within the Bosnian Serb community, and should be built up in importance as a center of opposition to Pale. Izetbegovic himself was ambivalent about taking the city, and feared that if it fell, it would only add to Croat-Bosnian tensions.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 166-167

Fear, Peace, Communication, Motivation

“Though I'm no expert on all things Pantera, I did hear their version of 'Cat Scratch Fever' and it was exceedingly white. No soul, no balls, no feel. Caucasian all the way. Elements of dope, booze and heroin disconnect quite apparent as usual. There is no excuse for such horrifically negative, irresponsible, criminal, America-wrecking behavior as such chimp-like substance abuse. Period. They appeared as Ozzy-like zombies on TV. Ya think. American drunks and dopers are allahpuke terrorists' favorite allies. Damn them. Damn them all.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Postings on Pantera (2006)

Way, Feeling, Soul, Cats

“In recent years, the studies of the effects of drugs on the behavior of animals have been playing an increasingly important role. Animal studies have been an advantage over studies with human subjects because better control of experimental variables and a possibility of using a wider range of the doses. It is also permissible to administer toxix compounds to animals. One can interfere surgically with various parts of the central nervous system while investigating the effects of the drugs. The whole field of comparative psychopharmacology has been recently reviewed”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Weckowicz (1967) "Chapter VI - Animal Studies of Hallucinogenic Drugs" in: Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond (1967) The hallucinogens. p. 555

Study, Animals, Parting

“I find from experience both with government agencies and with private business that there are striking differences. One of those differences is that, in government, there is more continuity and definition in the mandate. The limits of action are often clearly defined. in many cases by Congress. No such situation exists in large private business. Dimock says bureaucracies are related, for example, to size. Yet he points out some bearings on bureaucracies of the inadequacies in our federal civil service system and the conflict of loyalties which arises out of it. This, he states, he succeeded in overcoming. I have had contact with several war agencies made up mainly of businessmen. These men rapidly took on bureaucratic characteristics radically different from their own behavior in private life. The only close parallels I find in the areas of private business to the deadening effects of the present civil service are, on the one hand, what one of my old labor leaders used to call the "sonority" system and, on the other, the very real problems faced by management in dealing with labor which arise immediately out of the prolonged governmental support for organized labor-which is in my judgment bad for labor.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "Governmental and Business Executives", 1946, p. 176; cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 194-5

Life, Men, War, Business

“Host: In a nutshell, is what happened Islamic or un-Islamic?
Qaradhawi: The truth is that what happened is a reaction to these barbaric acts (in Abu Ghureib prison)…I say that the general atmosphere affects behavior… Even though Islam states that prisoners should be treated decently, there are those who allow killing a prisoner in certain circumstances.”

Yusuf Qaradawi (1926) Egyptian imam

Sheikh Dr. Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi about the Murder of American Citizen, Nick Berg http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/82.htm May 2004. Murder of Nick Berg

Truth

“Legal rules are to be judged by the structure of incentives they establish and the consequences of people altering their behavior in response to those incentives”

David D. Friedman (1945) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist

Source: Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do With Law and Why It Matters, 2001, p.11

People

“His concept of the anal character as one that has not reached maturity is in fact a sharp criticism of bourgeois society of the nineteenth century, in which the qualities of the anal character constituted the norm for moral behavior.”

Erich Fromm book To Have or to Be?

"To Have or to Be?" (2005) page 68

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Wisdom, Hunger, War, People

“Under these circumstances, men lose sight of themselves and escape into the security of work or sociability or other forms of what Vidich and Bensman have called the “externalization of the self.” Vidich and Bensman sketch a troubling picture of such men: “What is left of the personality is the dulled, autonomic ritualization of behavior where … no disturbing interferences are allowed to enter into thought. … Personal and social life becomes barren, and the personal mechanics and daily routine of living become the end-all of existence. All types of activity whose operation is based upon an objective, external, automatic rhythm to which an individual can bend himself serve the function of enabling him to lose himself in an objective ceremony.””

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 69, quotation is from A. J. Vidich and J. Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society (New York), p. 315

Life, Men, Personality

“And how does the God’s existence emerge from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach of continuity? Or have we not here an analogy to the behavior of the little Cartesian dolls? As soon as I let go of the doll it stands on its head. As soon as I let it go – I must therefore let it go. So also with the proof. As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i. e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason than that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there. But this act of letting go is surely also something; it is indeed a contribution of mine. Must not this also be taken into the account, this little moment, brief as it may be – it need not be long, for it is a leap. However brief this moment, if only an instantaneous now, this "now" must be included in the reckoning.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Philosophical Fragments (1844), p. 32

God

“A person is known by the behavior he displays consistently. An experiment by Himmelfarb (1972) makes the important point that consistency in other persons' characterizations of an actor carries more weight if they are based on observations in dissimilar rather than similar situations. The other side of the coin is that a person's inconsistent behavior is attributed not to him but to circumstances.”

Harold Kelley (1921–2003) American psychologist & academic

Source: "Attribution theory and research." 1980, p. 465

Personality

“Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.”

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

1991 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1991.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Money

“It is not quite reasonable to expect of our Government that it should lead us in the direction of Islamic integrity and solidarity—while that integrity and solidarity are absent in our own behavior.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 7, p 116

“The recoil from the absolute of mechanism was into an equally sterile absolute of the organic: the raw primitive. The organic processes, reduced to shadows by the machine, made a violent effort to retrieve their position. The machine, which acerbically denied the flesh, was offset by the flesh, which denied the rational, the intelligent, the orderly processes of behavior that have entered into all man’s cultural developments—even those developments that most closely derive from the organic. The spurious notion that mechanism had naught to learn from life was supplanted by the equally false notion that life had nothing to learn from mechanism.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 9

Life, Intelligence, Effort, Learning

“According to the first image of international relations, the locus of the important causes of war is found in the nature and behavior of man. Wars result from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stupidity.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter II, The First Image, p. 16

War, Stupidity, Nature, Selfishness

“I have reexamined the contemporary reports and new evidence which has come to light since Maunder's time and conclude that this 70-year period was indeed a time when solar activity all but stopped. This behavior is wholly unlike the modern behavior of the sun which we have come to accept as normal, and the consequences for solar and terrestrial physics seem to me profound.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Light, Time, Sun

“The main contemporary obstacle facing African Americans is neither white racism, as many liberals claim, nor black genetic deficiency, as Charles Murray and others imply. Rather it involves destructive and pathological cultural patterns of behavior: excessive reliance on government, conspiratorial paranoia about racism, a resistance to academic achievement as "acting white," a celebration of the criminal and outlaw as authentically black, and the normalization of illegitimacy and dependency.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 1

Dependency

“It's always such a pleasure to have Germans enlighten us on the best way to move large groups of sick, downtrodden people by rail. The only motivation I can ascribe to such behavior is that same one that propels young dim boys to tear the wings off flies.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

TRIBES https://web.archive.org/web/20050912004041/http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000129.html (5 September 2005) 2000s

People, Pleasure, Way, Boy

“The US lost control of security on day one, with the outbreak of looting. Iraqis are a people that had known nothing but a surplus of security. To suddenly take all that away and say, in effect, you are on your own, was unforgivable. They felt that no one was in control. And when your whole world is being turned upside down, the feeling that no one is in control is terrifying, and consequently it is conducive of the most irrational forms of behavior.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

People, World, Feeling

“In the psychological fields most fundamental to the whole behavior of living things the transition seems inevitable to a Galileian view of dynamics, which derives all its vectors not from single isolated objects, but from the mutual relations of the factors in the concrete whole situation, that is, essentially, from the momentary condition of the individual and the structure of the psychological situation. The dynamics of the processes is always to be derived from the relation of the concrete individual to the concrete situation, and, so far as internal forces are concerned, from the mutual relations of the various functional systems that make up the individual.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. 41; partly cited in: Kay Deaux, Mark Snyder (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. p. 74

Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) American physicist

Gene Amdahl, Gerrit Blaauw, and Fred Brooks (1964) " Architecture of the IBM System http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72.7974&rep=rep1&type=pdf." in: IBM Journal of Research and Development Vol 8 (2) p. 87-101

“From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, events seemed to prove the Keynesians correct. Then, beginning in the 1960s, several distinguished economists began to challenge Keynesian ideas. Their counterrevolutionary views, which in many ways mirrored those of the classical economists, were strengthened by events in the 1970s, when the economy’s behavior began to contradict some Keynesian ideas. But in 2008 and 2009, as the economy sank into the most serious worldwide recession since the Great Depression, Keynesian ideas were once again at the center of a heated debate about the causes of the problem and the appropriate remedies.”

Robert Hall (economist)

Robert E. Hall and Marc Lieberman, Macroeconomics (2012).

Way, Idea, Problem

“Conversation Theory is a summarization of our assumptions and rationale from this early period. Conversations are behaviors, but special kinds of behaviors with hard-valued observables in the form of concept sharings, detected as "understandings." Conversations are, we believe, the first basic data of psychological, social, or educational theory. We see later that people can even have conversations with themselves. Conversations which may lead to concept sharing need not be verbal. Often they are gestural, pictorial, or mediated through a computer interface.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Learning Strategies, Teaching Strategies, and Conceptual or Learning Style (1988)

People, Education, Understanding

“Should we worry about social media sites sharing everything they know about us with third-party commercial interests? Of course, no one wants to be pestered by targeted advertising. More sinister, however, is the prospect of health insurance companies learning whether you had been Googling research on specific illnesses or prospective employers prying into your personal social history by analyzing your data trail on the Web to spot potential quirks, idiosyncrasies, or even possible antisocial behavior.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

Health, History, Learning, Personality

“When modern horror films or fundamentalists talk about “demons,” they mean something very different than what Socrates meant by the term. It was a lot closer to what I was talking about: the essential drive, the highest self, if you like. So maybe there is a connection, when I met, or appeared to meet, a demon. It was a little bit frightening at first, but after a while we found that we got on OK and we could have a civilized conversation, and I found him very engaging, very pleasant. And it struck me that this was a brilliant literal example of the process of demonization. That when I had approached the demon with fear and loathing, it was fearsome and loathsome. When I approached it with respect, then it was respectable. And I thought, All right, there’s a kind of mirroring that is going on here that is probably applicable to a wide number of social situations. The people or classes of people that we demonize, and that we treat with fear and loathing, respond accordingly. We are projecting a persona of manner of behavior upon them, as well as responding to a manner of behavior that’s already there. When we’re looking at the flaws in their personality that we are able to recognize, the fact that we can recognize them suggests that they are probably in some way a version of flaws that we have ourselves.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

As quoted in ""HEY, YOU CAN JUST MAKE STUFF UP." Differences between magic and art: None" https://www.believermag.com/issues/201306/?read=interview_moore, by Peter Bebergal, The Believer, (2013). The Believer interview (2013)

People, Fear, Way, Appearance

“One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Love, Children, Boy

“To me, every fundamentalist Muslim, no matter how peaceable in his own behavior, is part of a murderous movement and is thus, in some fashion, a foot soldier in the war that bin Laden has launched against civilization.”

Daniel Pipes (1949) U.S. neoconservative columnist, author, counter-terrorism analyst, and scholar of Middle Eastern history

"Bin Laden Is a Fundamentalist," http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-pipes102201.shtml National Review Online (22 October 2001)

War, Fashion, Parting

“Be vegan’ and ‘make peace’ are fantastic four words to think about in daily life and in everything we do. Being vegan means to me that we not only eat healthy foods, but we have respect for all life on the planet. And that’s important. And ‘make peace,’ that’s important as well. Peace really has to start with us, individually. And then hopefully it will spread, and we emit that, so to speak, in our behavior in general and the things we do, whether it is private or work.”

George Chakiris (1934) American dancer, singer and actor

Source: "In-Depth with Loving the Silent Tears Guest Speaker: George Chakiris", GodsDirectContact.org (2012) http://www.godsdirectcontact.org.tw/eng/news/211/sr_42.htm.

Life, Peace, Food, Thinking

“Cultures and religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them. They are not well-bounded systems or definite clusters of beliefs, practices, and artifacts, but more or less regular distributions of causally connected thoughts, behaviors, material products, and environmental objects. To naturalistically understand what "cultures" are is to describe and explain the material causes responsible for reliable differences in these distributions.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 10
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Religion, Understanding

“Certain sensory experiences during the formative periods of development will create a neuropsychological predisposition for either violence-seeking or pleasure-seeking behaviors later in life.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Life, Pleasure

“Mr. Ellis is neither a scientist nor an expert on the natural behavior of wolves.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

B.J. King, "Why Are Wolf Scientists Howling At Jodi Picoult?" NPR. (April 19, 2012).

Nature

“The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

Game, Change, Parting

“CONSIDERABLE attention has recently been devoted to understanding behavior in large organizational systems. Although some of this work has been based on research, it has more typically been general theorizing with little support from research data. Our interest in examining complex organizations is to study more systematically and empirically their internal functioning in relation to the demands of the external environment on the organization and the ability of the organization to cope effectively with these demands, contributing to a theory of the functioning of large organizations based on empirical research.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: "Differentiation and integration in complex organizations," 1967, p. 2

Understanding, Support, Study

“The first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal.”

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

Source: 1940s-1950s, Models of Man, 1957, p. 198; Cited in P. Slovic (1972, p. 2).

World, Way, Optimism, Understanding

“Learning is an innate human behavior. A healthy baby is happy and excited to learn to speak, play and express itself. Why should learning stop being fun? The human race cannot survive without continuous learning. Let us impart the enthusiasm and creativity of learning in the classrooms.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Virginia Tech Collegiate Times (November 1990)

Happiness, Learning, Baby

““Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” asked Henry II as he instigated the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170. Down through the ages, presidents and princes around the world have been murderers and accessories to murder, as the great Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and Walter Lunden documented in statistical detail in their masterwork Power and Morality. One of their main findings was that the behavior of ruling groups tends to be more criminal and amoral than that of the people over whom they rule.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954) American economist

Killer Politicians, Project Syndicate - The World's Opinion Page, Oct 24, 2018 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/killer-politicians-include-american-presidents-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2018-10

People, Age, World

“Man is not only part of a field, but a part and member of his group. When people are together, as when they are at work, then the most unnatural behavior, which only appears in late stages or abnormal cases, would be to behave as separate Egos. Under normal circumstances they work in common, each a meaningfully functioning part of the whole.”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

Max Wertheimer (1924), cited in: Heinz L. Ansbacher (ed.), The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. 1954, p. 11

People, Appearance, Parting

“It is a major defect of our present organized system and the economy of abundance that, without providing great goals, it has taken away some of the important real necessities, leaving people with nothing to do.
The void is soon filled. Behavior like going into debt on the installment plan, gives an artificial but then real necessity, something to do, paying up. This is the Rat Race, but I doubt that it would be run if people did not need its justifying necessity, for the commodities themselves are not that attractive.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 154.

People

“There [is]… a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:
1. Economic theory should unify economic science. - The task of a general body of theory in any subject is to give unity to its investigations…
2. Economic theory should be relevant to the modern problem of control. - Students of economics should spend their efforts upon subjects worth investigation…
3. The proper subject-matter of economic theory is institutions. - The demand that economic theory relate to institutions is implicit in the plea for its relevancy…
4. Economic theory is concerned with matters of process. - If economic theory is to treat of institutions it must know both the kinds of things institutions are and the kinds of things they are not…
5. Economic theory must be based upon an acceptable theory of human behavior.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

After all control and institutions and processes are immediate things. They can all be translated into terms of human conduct...
Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311-6

Problem, Effort, Science

“Whilst the distinction of ‘society’ and ‘individual’ has colloquial (and political) meaning, those inclined to the analysis of complex systems are more likely to ask which groups or societies are real individuals, exhibiting functional or behavioral integrity, as self-reproducing wholes. In pursuing this line of investigation, it is far more relevant to discriminate between types of groups than between groups and individuals, or even wholes and parts. It is especially helpful to distinguish feature groups from unit groups.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Kinds of Killing" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032625/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1008/kinds-of-killing (2011) (original emphasis)

Help, Parting

“A class is a set of objects that share a common structure and a common behavior”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 513

“Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts.”

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

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts. There is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts the existence of a human being.

Parting

“For a given system, the environment is the set of all objects outside the system: (1) a change in whose attributes affect the system and (2) whose attributes are changed by the behavior of the system.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: A methodology for systems engineering, 1962, p. 61 cited in: Clute, Whitehead & Reid (1967) Progressive architecture. Vol.48, Nr. 7-9. p. 106

Change

“The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 29

Drawing, Personality

“When America's creditors consider our behavior they see total fiscal irresponsibility. They see a deluded country that acts as if it is a privilege for foreigners to lend to it, and a deluded country that believes that foreigners will continue to accumulate US debt until the end of time.The fact of the matter is that the US is bankrupt.”

Paul Craig Roberts (1939) American economist

"A Bankrupt Superpower" http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03182008.html, CounterPunch (2008-03-18)