At school boys become gluttons and slovens, and, instead of cultivating domestic affections, very early rush into the libertinism which destroys the constitution before it is formed; hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding.
My accent depends on whom I'm around.
I'm just a product of my environment, and it comes out in the music.
With a character like James Bulger, you have to approach him as a human. No one wakes up in the morning and says, as they are brushing their teeth, 'I am going to do something evil today.' He was a businessman - in his business, the violence was just part of his job, let's say. It was also the language of the people he associated with and opposed.
I think people are just puzzled by why people where I'm from make the political choices sometimes that they do.
It is possible to analyze the biological and social influences that make each human being unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable, but this analysis does not explain how and why each feels different from all other human beings.
I think it's a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software.
There's more to distract people, isn't there? When I was a kid there was music and football and clothes. And that was kind of it, really. Those three things defined you as a person.
I haven't figured out why people like what they like. I don't know. I wish I did. I could sell that to everybody, man, and be a millionaire.
Our morality is based on so many factors: of where we were born, who we were born to, what values were instilled in us, what values we chose, the way that our lives have shaped us. That dictates so much of what we assume is our morality, and also the culture, all of these things.
The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
Everyone is a product of their own environment, and that, I think, has actually been the key lesson for me.
I think music follows the trends of the collective conscious.
We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains--chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment--in a word, Circumstance--and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Most of your desires are not really about yourself. You just picked them up from your social surroundings.
It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.
The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.
Fashion takes its inspiration from society and everyday life, which is the same for everyone, and this is perhaps the reason why certain elements recur.
It's very hard to describe to people sometimes the way I grew up, because it wasn't like my parents were irresponsible. They weren't necessarily reckless, but they were bringing all types of energy into the house, all kinds of people.
I really do believe in the influence of your surroundings.
But in the life of every man there are influences of a far more real and penetrating character than those which come through the medium of schools or teachers.
My son, before he went to school, he'd eat pretty much everything. Then as soon as he went to school, he got some peer pressure, and other kids would say, 'Oh, you're gonna eat that. That's horrible. That's disgusting.'
These are the influences that everybody has. Some individuals might stand out because of one thing or another, but whether one's perception as a child of what was important or not is accurate, I don't know.
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
