Behavior Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

The more you engage in any type of emotion or behavior, the greater your desire for it will become.

The essential wildness of science as a manifestation of human behavior is not generally perceived. As we extract new things of value from it, we also keep discovering parts of the activity that seem in need of better control, more efficiency, less unpredictability.

Whenever we see anyone in a high or low position, male or female, they differ only in appearance, dress, behavior, and status. In essence they are all equal--they all experience problems in their lives.

We make every effort to see that our actions live up to our words and be vigilant with regards to our behavior.

It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

For most of us even the imagined threat of criticism functions to control our behavior. We are haunted to some degree by questions about our self-worth. As a consequence, we continually attempt to prove to ourselves and others that we are okay people, credible, trustworthy, and competent.

Our belief systems are the glasses through which we each view the world and anticipate what is likely to unfold. Our behavior is always loyal with our beliefs.

Behavior runs in deep channels that were cut during early childhood, and it is very difficult to alter them. In order to change a deeply ingrained pattern, you have to build a sturdy dam, dig another canal and reroute the river in the new direction. That effort is rarely successful over the long haul.

I've had only one idea in my life - a true idee fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible - the idea of having my own way. 'Control!' expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!

Understanding child development takes the emphasis away from the child's character--looking at the child as good or bad. The emphasis is put on behavior as communication. Discipline is thus seen as problem-solving. The child is helped to learn a more acceptable manner of communication.

Many teenagers spend more time in front of the television than they do in the classroom, and their sexual behavior in part reflects what they have learned from this thoroughly unreliable teacher. Nowhere is it more apparent than on television that America suffers from sexual schizophrenia: We exploit sex, and at the same time we try to repress it.

Littlewood's proof... revealed that prime numbers are masters of disguise. They hide their true colours in the deep recesses of the universe of numbers, so deep that witnessing their true nature may be beyond the computational power of humankind. Their true behavior can be seen only through the penetrating eyes of abstract mathematical proof.

Marcus du Sautoy

They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.

Sebastian Faulks

The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.

William S. Burroughs

Human beings are distinguished by a capacity for experience as well as by their behavior, and homosexuality is as much a matter ofemotion as of genital manipulation.... As we each examine our own sense of identity we realize how much more complex is the question of homosexuality than a mere Kinsey-like computation of orgasms.

I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game. The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use to move through three- or four- dimensional space is a game. It doesn't matter how serious we take it, or how serious its consequences are.

Douglas Rushkoff

Dance therapy provides an outlet for energy and a safe and playful environment in which many areas of conflict can be identified and worked through, and appropriate adult roles and behavior tried out.

Judith Lynne Hanna

If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning.

Kenneth Lee Pike

Sick is a relative concept. We're all sick. The question is, what degree of functionality do we have with respect to the rules society sets for desirable behavior? No actions are in themselves symptoms of sickness. You have to look at the context within which these actions are performed.

In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect. This is pretty nice. It's also a psychological trap that can stop one's growth and allow one to get away with just plain bad behavior.

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

John Taylor Gatto

Every attempt to explain human behavior, especially the irrational, must as a matter of course end in simplification.

Morton Irving Seiden

I have seen white settlers in Africa who had sworn that they would never sit down to table with those "smelly blacks" sit down quite happily with half-nude tribesmen once a country achieves independence. It is the context of power which changes behavior and transmutes antipathy into sympathy.