Behavior Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

Social power [is the] potential influence, the ability of a person or group to induce or prevent change in another. Social control [is] the process by which members of a social entity are influenced to adhere to values and principles of proper behavior deemed appropriate for that social entity.

Molecular dynamics is not primarily about making movies of molecules. More often it is about developing quantitative predictions of molecular size and shape, flexibilities, interactions with other molecules, behavior under pressure, and the relative frequency of one state or conformation compared to another.

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.

What does it mean to love someone with all your heart? It means to love with all your emotional feelings and with all your devotion. Surely when you love your wife with all your heart, you cannot demean her, criticize her, find fault with her, or abuse her by words, sullen behavior, or actions.

Ezra Taft Benson

Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure — which, given his gregarious nature, would seem a much more survival-oriented behavior. Poll any hundred people at random and you'll find at least twenty or thirty who know all there is to know about psychological torture and psychic castration — and maybe two who know how to give a terrific back-rub.

Spider Robinson

I thought that the evidence against your claims about me would shame you into changing your behavior. But, five years since you started misrepresenting my role in the founding of Wikipedia, you're still at it.

In other words, words can be empty and all that does is just reinforce the bad behavior of tyrants.

In Administrative Behavior, bounded rationality is largely characterized as a residual category — rationality is bounded when it falls short of omniscience. And the failures of omniscience are largely failures of knowing all the alternatives, uncertainty about relevant exogenous events, and inability to calculate consequences. There was needed a more positive and formal characterization of the mechanisms of choice under conditions of bounded rationality... Two concepts are central to the characterization: search and satisficing.

Herbert A. Simon

If you like business, you have to like GE. If you like ideas, you have to love GE. This is a place where ideas can flow freely from and through more than 20 separate businesses and more than 300,000 employees. Boundaryless behavior allows ideas to come from anywhere. We formalize our freewheeling style in a series of operating meetings that blend into one another.

Nowadays, you form your beliefs to fit your behavior, not the other way around.

The price of a stock is strongly influenced by the behavior of the traders in a nontrivial way.

Didier Sornette

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.

Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.

Robert A. Heinlein

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

A relatively strong sexual identification is important under those circumstances - but (louder) an over-identification with them, before or afterward, can lead to stereotyped behavior, in which the greater needs and abilities of the individual are not allowed fulfillment.

Cybernetics treats not things but ways of behaving. It does not ask what is this thing? but what does it do?... It is thus essentially functional and behaviouristic. Cybernetics deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible. The materiality is irrelevant... The truths of cybernetics are not conditional on their being derived from some other branch of science. Cybernetics has its own foundations.

We can search among the unconscious, emotion-laden learning rules for the kind of behavior most directly influenced by genetic evolution.

Even if all the laws of psychology were known, one could make a prediction about the behavior of a man only if in addition to the laws, the special nature of the particular situation were known.

Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that people have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them.

Everyone knew that democracy-direct rule by all the people-required such spartan, sel denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.

He found insanity no excuse, however, for irrational behavior.

Brandon Sanderson

Simplicity has power. Founding our life on constructive, positive behavior is the simplest, most direct, and powerful approach I've ever found-simple, but not easy.

There are ways to get worse publicity than Tom Wappel, the MP who wrote an 81–year–old, a veteran, legally blind and partially deaf, and told him, sneeringly, in effect to get lost– because the old man had not voted Liberal. [...] Here are some: You could nail a five–day–old kitten to the floor and use it as a doorstop. You could cut off the heat to an orphanage in winter, and insist the little ones dance for stale biscuits, and then not give them any. Or you could take a chainsaw to the last redwood that was also the home of the last eagle and have it fall on the last panda. Outside of these cringing options, however Mr. Tom Wappel has more or less cornered the market in the Olympics of obnoxious behavior.

Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.