Social Conditioning Quotes

One of the wiser clichés of the 20th century stated that if you aren’t a Communist before you are 21, there is something wrong with your heart. If you remain one after you are 21, there is something wrong with your head.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

It is startling to see how the oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.

Most blacks are happy, except those who have had other ideas pushed into their ears.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

Man is a child of his environment.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it.

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.

Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.

The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence without that affects him after his birth.

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and has stimulated the hope of instant results.

There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.

Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

There are people who would never have been in love, had they never heard love spoken of.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

Television and movies were our biggest teachers. When we came to the United States, the Vietnam War was just ratcheting up. And so the Asian faces that I saw on the news, they were the face of the enemy. Asian men, particularly, were either small, ineffective, or they were evil. And those messages were deeply, deeply embedded in me for many years.

Prejudice is a learned trait. You're not born prejudiced; you're taught it.

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.

There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.