Social Behavior Quotes

• Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it.

  Kenneth Lee Pike

  Anger, Society, Identity

  Kenneth Lee Pike (1982). “Linguistic Concepts: An Introduction to Tagmemics”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.

  Nikola Tesla

  Intelligence, World, Antisocial

  460 Copy quote

• A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

  Albert Einstein

  Sympathy, God, Death

  Albert Einstein (2010). “Ideas And Opinions”, p.39, Broadway Books

  118 Copy quote

  Show source

• Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.

  Stanley Milgram

  Action, Realizing, Force

  Stanley Milgram (1992). “The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments”, McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is really intolerable that we can say only one thing at a time; for social behavior displays many features at the same time, and so in taking them up one by one we necessarily do outrage to its rich, dark, organic unity.

  George C. Homans

  Dark, Unity, Rich

  1961 Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms.

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Success, Magic Moments, Ideas

  "Women at the Tipping Point...Is Corporate America Ready?" by Jeffery Tobias Halter, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 16, 2017.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don’t want traffic behavior, I want social behavior.

  Hans Monderman

  Want, Traffic, Behavior

  7 Copy quote

• Those social behaviors which automatically preclude the building of a democratic world must go - every social limitation of human beings in terms of heredity, whether it be of race, or sex, or class. Every social institution which teaches human beings to cringe to those above and step on those below must be replaced by institutions which teach people to look each other straight in the face.

  Margaret Mead

  Sex, Equality, Race

  Margaret Mead (2000). “And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America”, p.161, Berghahn Books

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Etiquette is about all of human social behavior. Behavior is regulated by law when etiquette breaks down or when the stakes are high - violations of life, limb, property and so on. Barring that, etiquette is a little social contract we make that we will restrain some of our more provocative impulses in return for living more or less harmoniously in a community.

  Judith Martin

  Law, Community, Littles

  "Polite Company". Interview with Hara Estroff Marano, www.psychologytoday.com. March 1, 1998.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is no more informative to speak of self-efficacy in global terms than to speak of nonspecific social behavior

  Albert Bandura

  Self, Speak, Efficacy

  6 Copy quote

• Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.

  Richard K. Morgan

  Perfectly Normal, Understanding, Theory

  8 Copy quote

• It's the bond between mother and child, which is really for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.

  Jane Goodall

  Mother, Children, Expression

  "Bill Moyers Journal", www.pbs.org. November 27, 2009.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Capitalism creates a huge community of producers who are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor, and an oligarchy that cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized society....the subjugation is not by force but because the privileged class has long ago established a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

  Albert Einstein

  Long Ago, Class, People

  32 Copy quote

• Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave.

  Ellen Willis

  People, Human Nature, Economics

  Letter to "The New York Times", February 27, 1997.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Knowing about the neurobiological and evolutionary basis for social behavior can soften the arrogance and self-righteousness that often attends discussions of morality. It may help us all to think a little more carefully and rationally.

  Patricia Churchland

  Thinking, Self, Knowing

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Humanity, Tasks, Extinction

  R. Buckminster Fuller “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whether it's someone struggling with mental illness, someone struggling with poverty or struggling with their own limitations in their social behaviors, for some reason, I'm drawn to characters like that.

  Gbenga Akinnagbe

  Struggle, Character, Poverty

  4 Copy quote

• One of the basic steps in saving a threatened species is to learn more about it: its diet, its mating and reproductive processes, its range patterns, its social behavior.

  Dian Fossey

  Saving, Patterns, Steps

  58 Copy quote

• The significance of the crucifixion is not only what God does for us; consistently throughout the New Testament the crucifixion is portrayed as the pattern that we are to follow. It is a model of social behavior toward the other as well as a statement about what God has done for us.

  Miroslav Volf

  Doe, Done, Patterns

  "The Clumsy Embrace". Interview with Kevin D. Miller, www.christianitytoday.com. October 26, 1998.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art". - Herbert Marcuse
  "Play is a phenomenon of nature and has directed the course of the world from the beginning of time: the formation of matter, its organization into living structures as well as the social behavior of man.

  Manfred Eigen

  Art, Fun, Men

  5 Copy quote

• It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

  Antonin Artaud

  Struggle, Night, People

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.486, Univ of California Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Music defines decades, and quite clearly shapes the rhythm, vitality of fashion, attitude and social behaviors. The anthology, just like most of my work, from photography to fashion design, is about and around music.

  Hedi Slimane

  Photography, Fashion, Attitude

  Source: www.cnn.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man - whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.

  Jane Goodall

  Animal, Men, Pet

  "Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe". Book by Jane Goodall, 2000.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.

  Terence McKenna

  Needs, Dilemma, Anti Social

  4 Copy quote

• Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored Information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?

  Albert Claude

  Life, Hero, Science

  7 Copy quote