Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
[Behavior] [Malcolm Gladwell] [Cultural] [Legacies]
It wasn?t that she necessarily wanted to socialize at the bonfire, but she wanted to broadcast to the general population that her antisocial behavior was a personal choice not a sentence to social leprosy.
[Horror] [Choice] [Behavior] [Teen] [J.D. Stroube] [Social] [Bonfire] [Cliques] [Antisocial] [Leprosy]
Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.
[Art] [Books] [Beauty] [Ralph Waldo Emerson] [Culture] [Power] [Behavior] [Wealth] [Illusion] [Eloquence] [Anderbo] [Father Must] [Anderbo Com] [Jonathan Galassi] [Rrofihe] [Rofihe] [Rick Rofihe] [Gail Hochman] [Whiting Award] [Vilcek Literature Prize]
Of course genes can?t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.
[Behavior] [Thought] [Steven Pinker] [Patterns] [Genes] [Temperments]