Christopher Alexander Quotes

Your environment affects you wherever you are.

A lot of times you're just conditioned by what's around you.

I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They're not creating it; they're not initiating anything. It's all found somewhere else. That's an awful lot to relinquish.

We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.

We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.

We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition

We are always influenced because we do not live in a vacuum together with our intentions. We are in a relationship with everything that occurs.

If you or I had lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result, would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power: monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the media today.

The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

I am drawn to the ways in which we are shaped by people and by place.

I think I'm passionately allowing myself to be influenced by the things that are around me.

Environment is stronger than will.

Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.

Psychotherapy makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong.

Bad dogs, she believed, were like most bad children: created by those around them. But then, that was a personal opinion.

Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings.

I have not said your values are wrong. But neither are they right. They are simply judgments. Assessments. Decisions. For the most part, they are decisions made not by you, but by someone else. Your parents, perhaps. Your religion. Your teachers, historians, politicians.

We're all products of our environment. The key is not to fall.

Once you accept the fact that people have 'individual choices' and they're 'free' to make those choices. Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents, and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced. So there can't be free choices.

Use almost can change the stamp of nature.

But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.

No one can control his own opinion or his own belief. My belief was forced upon me by my surroundings. I am the product of all circumstances that have in any way touched me.

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

Few men progress, except as they are pushed along by events.