This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Kate Millet, Katherine Murray Millett
The entire construct of the "medical model" of "mental illness"What is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatry: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofs—in damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularity—in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.
Laura Schlesinger, fully Laura Catherine Schlessinger, aka Dr. Laura
There is, I believe, no such thing as unconditional self-acceptance. Those who say so are promulgating a pernicious lie. One must first live a decent, honorable and productive life. Only then do you get to feel good about yourself. Seeking to heedlessly gratify your desires or impulses of the moment to do things (or fail to do things) your conscience knows to be contrary to your standards of right, worthy and virtuous behavior is, in a mental, emotional and spiritual sense, akin to spending capital that you have not earned, and therefore will eventually cause you to feel very negatively … about who and what you are. You cannot in the long run have your cake and eat it too. The longer … you behave in certain ways, the more it comes to define you, not only to others, but also to yourself.
Behavior | Cause | Conscience | Good | Will |
Laura Schlesinger, fully Laura Catherine Schlessinger, aka Dr. Laura
So it is the fear, weakness, selfishness, and cowardice of onlookers that permit evil behavior to persist.
Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
In general, kids have very little tolerance for humiliation or failure. One of a student's most important goals is to make it through the day without embarrassment. Imagine then, the frustration of children with differences in learning, who are at risk of growing up deprived of experiencing success. Naturally, they compare themselves to their peers and siblings. While some may see themselves as "different," many will feel inferior. Unfortunately, these feelings are likely to endure. When they do, serious complications can develop including plummeting self- esteem, behavior problems, excessive dependence on peers, alienation from family, deep anxiety, and a loss of motivation. The sad reality is that a difference in learning, not addressed as such, can lead to anti-social behavior, substance abuse, dropping out, and other serious forms of maladjustment.
Alienation | Behavior | Children | Day | Dependence | Feelings | Goals | Important | Little | Reality | Risk | Will | Loss |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
Behavior | Consequences | Desire | Difficulty | Pain | Responsibility |
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
Action is purposive conduct. It is not simply behavior, but behavior begot by judgments of value, aiming at a definite end and guided by ideas concerning the suitability or unsuitability of definite means. . . . It is conscious behavior. It is choosing. It is volition; it is a display of the will.
Ashley Montagu, fully Montague Francis Ashley Montagu, born Israel Ehrenberg
Cooperation, not conflict, has been the most valuable form of behavior for humans taken at any stage of their evolutionary history.
Behavior |
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.
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
Behavior | Eternal | Fear | Punishment | Question |
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like paternity seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call 'natural' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man as it were in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man.
Ambiguity | Anger | Behavior | Cause | Conduct | Feelings | Genius | Life | Life | Love | Man | Reality | Sense | Simplicity | Time |
Max DePree, alternatively De Pree or Depree
Leaders are walking and talking manuals of behavior. As we listen to them, we silently ask ourselves what they did last Friday morning when there was a problem. And we watch. And just as surely as financial people measure return on assets, we all measure the behavior of our leaders. We measure it against our ideals and our realities.
It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.
Behavior | Exaggeration | Ideas | Mind |
Those blinded by civilization have contact with their own tabbood mimetic traits only through certain gestures and forms of behavior they encounter in others, isolated, shameful residues in their rationalized environment. What repels them as alien is all too familiar. It lurks in the contagious gestures of an immediacy suppressed by civilization: gestures of touching, nestling, soothing, coaxing. What makes such impulses repellent today is their outmodedness. In seeking to win over the buyer with flattery, the debtor with threats, the creditor with supplication, they appear to translate long-reified human relationships back into those of personal power. Any emotion is finally embarrassing; mere excitement is preferable. All unmanipulated expression appears like the grimace which the manipulated expression…always has.
Behavior | Civilization | Excitement |
Max DePree, alternatively De Pree or Depree
Whether leaders articulate a personal philosophy or not, their behavior surely expresses a personal set of values and beliefs. The way we build and hold our relationships, the physical settings we produce, the products and services our organizations provide, the way in which we communicate—all of these things reveal who we are.
Behavior | Philosophy |
Max DePree, alternatively De Pree or Depree
Whether leaders articulate a personal philosophy or not, their behavior surely expresses a personal set of values and beliefs.
Behavior | Philosophy |
All human behavior is scheduled and programmed through rationality. There is a logic of institutions and in behavior and in political relations. In even the most violent ones there is a rationality. What is most dangerous in violence is its rationality. Of course violence itself is terrible. But the deepest root of violence and its permanence come out of the form of the rationality we use. The idea had been that if we live in the world of reason, we can get rid of violence. This is quite wrong. Between violence and rationality there is no incompatibility.
Behavior | Logic | Rationality | World |