Best ordinary & social Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“One reason I can be more tolerant than most is that as a therapist I have the advantage of information about my patients that most people are not privy to. And I discover that we rarely if ever see the totality of another in ordinary social intercourse. When an individual appears mean and lazy, we are only seeing one part of the person, elicited by a particular set of circumstances on a particular day, and we do well to wait a while before concluding that what we see is the whole person.”

“I am not [...] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time. [...] [T]he center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.”

Humans Lying Social Kindness Violence Human Nature Thousand Ten Ordinary Claims Response Bounds Stability Aggressive Usual Rooted Ignored Frequency Acts Of Kindness Spades Geniality

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.”

“As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the "banality of evil" -- that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable.”

“We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research--and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's--shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line.”

People Way Want Believe Different Shows Body Social Lines Minutes Mines Normal Research Ordinary Majority Experiments Superiors Psychological Tempted Psychological Research

Author:Philip Zimbardo

“The "Lucifer Effect" describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It represents a transformation of human character that is significant in its consequences. Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in "total situations," where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play.”

“The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.”

Mind Social Grows Fields Ordinary Tasks Presses Details Senses Significance Civilized Hunters Cognition Naturalist Woodland Small Details Scanning Pleasantries

Author:E. O. Wilson

“Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.”

People Literature Social Wealth Findings Ordinary Capitalism Hollywood Strive Productions Pursuit Enjoyment Villain Dominance Prestige Egalitarianism Pursuit Of Wealth

Author:Alex Tabarrok

“Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.”

Art Reality Artist Choices Literature Social Wealth Deals Conditions Talent Position Pages Ordinary Psychological Realism Exceptional Imaginative Freedom Of Choice

Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley

Source: The collected works of Aldous Huxley

“A lot of people that get out of prison have anti-social personality disorder, which makes them promiscuous and erratic, and they can't form ordinary relationships.”

People Form Social Personality Ordinary Prison Disorder Promiscuous Erratic Anti Social Personality Disorders

Author:Antony Starr

“Music can be a distraction and an escape. Sometimes a welcome escape. You need it. But music can also serve a very important social function because music can do things that mere prose, mere ordinary political agitation can't do.”

Needs Important Sometimes Political Social Can Do Ordinary Function Mere Welcome Prose Distraction Agitation

Author:Howard Zinn

“It is tempting to believe that social evils arise from the activities of evil men and that if only good men (like ourselves, naturally) wielded power, all would be well. That view requires only emotion and self-praise - easy to come by and satisfying as well. To understand why it is that 'good' men in positions of power will produce evil, while the ordinary man without power but able to engage in voluntary cooperation with his neighbors will produce good, requires analysis and thought, subordinating emotions to the rational.”

“I do not believe that the spiritual law works on a field of its own. On the contrary, it expresses itself only through the ordinary activities of life. It thus affects the economic, the social and the political fields.”

Believe Spiritual Law Political Social Economic Fields Activity Ordinary Contrary

Book:Gandhi: Selected Writings

Source: Gandhi: Selected Writings

“Stereotypes are ways of making extremely primitive and simple differentiations. Differentiations of gender, race, class, social status - so ordinary social life is very much built upon a whole repertoire of stereotypes we carry around. And those are immediately laminated onto people, and it isn't just visual.”

People Way Whole Life Is Social Simple Race Class Ordinary Built Gender Visuals Primitive Stereotype Social Life Differentiation Social Status

Author:W. J. T. Mitchell

“In ordinary life, the phenomenology of embodied emotions is an excellent example for dynamic changes between transparency and opacity: You can "directly perceive" that your wife is cheating you, or you can become aware of the possibility that maybe it is you who has a problem, that your "immediate" emotional representation of social reality might actually be a misrepresentation.”

Problem Reality Might Social Emotion Wife Example Possibility Emotional Ordinary Excellent Perceive Cheating Representation Transparency Ordinary Life Phenomenology Misrepresentation

Author:Thomas Metzinger

“Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.”

Mean Social Speech Ordinary Fundamentals Instruction Vocabulary Intercourse

Book:Democracy And Education

Source: Democracy And Education

“The role of social media is critical because it helps to spread cognitive dissonance by connecting thought leaders and activists to ordinary citizens rapidly expanding the network of people who become willing to take action.”

“Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton.”

Games Social Party Ordinary Subtle Badminton

Book:The Shipping News

Source: The Shipping News

“Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.”

Way Needs Persons Stills Soul Body Spirit Social Understanding Impossible Achieve Becoming Ambition Ordinary Slavery Intimate Trapped Commerce Understanding Each Other

Book:The late Mattia Pascal

Source: The late Mattia Pascal

“Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.”

World Self Reading Social Bed Ordinary Lust Invisible Realms Conventions Thrill Sheets Forbidden Idleness Self Centered

Author:Alberto Manguel

“[However], the sufferer from depression has no option, and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must ... present a face approximating the one associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod, and frown and, God help him, even smile.”

Trying War Helping Faces Social Situation Events Walking Ordinary Companionship Thrust Casualties God Help Sufferers Small Talk

Author:William Styron

“Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.”

Writing Mind Kind Might Poetry Language Social Voice Communication Ordinary Prose Delicate Discourse Spiders Witchcraft Tease Unfathomable Sly

Book:(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities

Source: (Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities

“All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage.”

People Spiritual Social Justice Common Class Materials Diversity Ordinary Advantage Pressure Social Justice Depth Intensity Epic Handicaps Social Pressure Common Experience

Book:Crit Temp Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture

Source: Crit Temp Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture

“Terrorism isn't insanity. It grows out of social conditions that are well known: poverty, social oppression, dictatorship, and a void of meaning in the lives of ordinary people.”

People Life Wells Social Grows Known Poverty Conditions Ordinary Terrorism Oppression Insanity Void Dictatorship Well Known Ordinary People Social Conditions

Author:Deepak Chopra

“Is it not possible to look beyond the canes, the wheelchairs, the braces, and the crutches into the hearts of the people who have need of these aids? They are human beings and want only to be treated as ordinary people. They may appear different, move awkwardly, and speak haltingly, but they have the same feelings. ... They want to be loved for what they are inside, without any prejudice for their impairment. Can there not be more tolerance for differences-differences in capacity, differences in body and in mind?”

“Most leaders are indispensable, but to produce a major social change, many ordinary people must also be involved.”

People Social Leader Produce Involved Majors Ordinary Productions Indispensable Social Change Ordinary People

Author:Anne Scott

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