societal behavior Quotes

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

Everybody loves success, but they hate successful people.

Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco.

It is a maxim of wise government to treat people not as they should be but as they actually are.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.

People don't change under governments. Governments change. People remain the same.

No nation was ever drunk when wine was cheap.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?

Even in the most market-obsessed society, we're still spending half of our time on something other than just getting cash.

Words are like leaves,. . .like people really, fond of their own society.

It was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common.

We resist Joy on this planet more than we resist war.

An instructed and intelligent people are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.

I'm under the impression that this notion of decency is disappearing from our society where conflicts are made worse on cinema and on television, where people are nasty and cruel on the Internet and where, in general, everybody seems to be very angry.

Man is a social animal.

The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in -telephonic, technological and relational -to alter even the slightest bit of behavior in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.

I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that 'Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.' And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, 'Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' So which is it - stupidity, ignorance or insanity - that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?

I find that our response to homelessness really puzzlingly. It's a peculiar response that people have.

war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.

It is an amazing fact of human nature that one year we can be chopping each other up and the next year we can be sharing a pint. We seem to often devolve into conflict no matter how much we evolve...

Sometimes humanity is the reason we can't have nice things