This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Do what he will, he [the profane man] is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present in him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being.
Moshé Feldenkreis, fully Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais
Nothing is permanent about our behavior patterns except our belief that they are so.
Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
“O man, try to understand this. Try to change into a true human being and try to live in that way, serving all lives. Let your actions fit your words. Let your speech be put into action in the form of duty. Let your outer behavior match your inner qualities. With those qualities you can rule the kingdom of God and show others how to live in the kingdom in equality, peace, and tranquility. That is a life of freedom. Realize this, O man.” The Fellowship teaches so many things. It explains what a life of human freedom is. It shows the way to realize the faults of man and to avoid them. It teaches and illustrates the qualities of God. That is the function of the Fellowship.
Action | Behavior | Change | Freedom | God | Life | Life | Qualities | Rule | God | Understand |
The central issue was whether the university was to continue to govern herself in an age-old and tested manner, or whether she was to reverse her earlier pattern of thoughtful, independent behavior to begin now to be governed by outside pressure.
It is one thing to decry the rat race...that is the good and honorable work of moralists. It is quite another thing to quit the rat race, to drop out, to refuse to run any further--that is the work of the individualist. It is offensive because it is impolite it makes the rebuke personal the individualist calls not his or her behavior into question, but mine.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.
Behavior |
The nervous systems of other animals were not artificially constructed - as a robot might be artificially constructed - to mimic the pain behavior of humans. A capacity to feel pain obviously enhances a species' prospects of survival... it is surely unreasonable to suppose that nervous systems that are virtually identical physiologically, have a common origin and a common evolutionary function, and result in similar forms of behavior in similar circumstances should actually operate in an entirely different manner on the level of subjective feelings.
Behavior | Capacity | Circumstances | Pain |
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
In the twentieth century the magnificent sensate house of Western man began to deteriorate rapidly and then to crumble. There was, among other things, a disintegration of its moral, legal, and other values which, from within, control and guide the behavior of individuals and groups. When human beings cease to be controlled by deeply interiorized religious, ethical, aesthetic and other values, individuals and groups become the victims of crude power and fraud as the supreme controlling forces of their behavior, relationship, and destiny. In such circumstances, man turns into a human animal driven mainly by his biological urges, passions, and lust. Individual and collective unrestricted egotism flares up; a struggle for existence intensifies; might becomes right; and wars, bloody revolutions, crime, and other forms of interhuman strife and bestiality explode on an unprecedented scale. So it was in all great transitory periods.
Aesthetic | Behavior | Control | Existence | Fraud | Individual | Man | Power | Struggle |
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
To sum up: all empirically rooted socio¬cultural phenomena are made up of three components: 1) meanings-values-norms; 2) physical and biological vehicles objectifying them; 3) mindful-conscious and supraconscious-human beings (and groups) that create, operate and use them in the process of their interaction. Respectively (1) The totality of meanings, values, norms possessed by individuals or groups makes up their ideological culture; (2) the totality of their meaningful actions, through which the pure meanings-values-norms are manifested and realized, makes up their behavioral culture; (3) the totality of all the other vehicles, the material, bio-physical things and energies through which their ideological culture is externalized, solidified, socialized and functions make up their 'material culture'. Thus, the total behavior and empirical culture of a person or group is made up of these three cultural levels-the ideological, the behavioral, and the material.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
The main uniform effect of calamities upon the political and social structure of society is an expansion of governmental regulation, regimentation, and control of social relationships and a decrease in the regulation and management of social relationships by individuals and private groups. The expansion of governmental control and regulation assumes a variety of forms, embracing socialistic or communistic totalitarianism, fascist totalitarianism, monarchial autocracy, and theocracy. Now it is effected by a revolutionary regime, now by a counterrevolutionary regime; now by a military dictatorship, now by a dictatorship, now by a dictatorial bureaucracy. From both the quantitative and the qualitative point of view, such an expansion of governmental control means a decrease of freedom, a curtailment of the autonomy of individuals and private groups in the regulation and management of their individual behavior and their social relationships, the decline of constitutional and democratic institutions.
Behavior | Control | Individual | Means | Regulation | Society | Society |
Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini NULL
Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.
Behavior | Brotherhood | Children | Forgiveness | History | People | Forgiveness |
Did I know that I had begun my life in a totalitarian state? How could I have? I didn’t even realize that I was being treated in a cruel and confusing way, something I would never have dreamed of suggesting. So rather than question my mother’s behavior, I cast doubt on the rightness of my own feeling that I was being unjustly treated. As I had no point of comparison of her behavior with that of other mothers, and as she constantly portrayed herself as the embodiment of duty and self-sacrifice, I had no choice but to believe her. And, anyway, I had to believe her. To have realized the truth would have killed me.
Behavior | Choice | Doubt | Duty | Life | Life | Question | Truth |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals — rats and monkeys, for example — that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming 'depressed' in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And — what is especially relevant here — they avoid fighting even in self-defense ... My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers — the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being 'reamed out' by managers — are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth.
The first step is to take weapons off the streets and to put more police on them. 25,000 new police officers are being trained, with the goal of adding 75,000 more by the end of the decade. Taking a cue from what's worked in the past, cities are deploying officers differently, getting them out from behind desks and putting them back on the sidewalks, where they can get to know the people who live and work on the streets they patrol. They will be doing what is called community policing. The other half of community policing, of course, is the community's role. Citizens have to be active participants in crime prevention. In Houston, nearly a thousand new officers added to the city's police force since 1991 have been joined by thousands of citizen patrollers observing and reporting suspicious or criminal behavior in an anticrime campaign.
New research in childhood development establishes that a child's environment affects everything from IW to future behavior patterns. These studies confirm the importance of breast-feeding infants, of setting aside time for family meals, and of empowering parents to shield their children from predatory marketing and the violent and sexually explicit media that contribute to aggressive behavior, early sexual experimentation, obesity, and depression. The case for quality early childhood education and programs like Head Start is stronger than ever, and we should expand them. According to a study conducted by Federal Reserve economist Rob Grunewald and conducted by Nobel laureate economist James Heckman, high-quality preschool programs are among the most cost-effective public investments we make, lowering dependency and raising lifetime earnings.
Behavior | Childhood | Children | Education | Family | Future | Parents | Public | Research | Reserve | Study | Time |
The following points are intended to amplify my meaning: 1. All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection. 2. For their development, children need to the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world. 3. When these vital needs are frustrated and children are, instead, abused for the sake of the adults' needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired. 4. The normal reactions to such injury should be anger and pain. Since children in this hurtful kind of environment are forbidden to express their anger, however, and since it would be unbearable to experience their pain all alone, they are compelled to suppress their feelings, repress all memory of the trauma, and idealize those guilty of the abuse. Later they will have no memory of what was done to them. 5. Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide). 6. If these people become parents, they will then often direct acts of revenge for their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats. Child abuse is still sanctioned -- indeed, held in high regard -- in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents. 7. If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials and nurses to support the child and believe in her or him. 8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great-grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve their parents, whom they invariably love [I would say 'need' - SH] of all responsibility. 9. For some years now, it has been possible to prove, through new therapeutic methods, that repressed traumatic experiences of childhood are stored up in the body and, though unconscious, exert an influence even in adulthood. In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults -- that a child responds to and learns both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning. 10. In the light of this new knowledge, even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood need no longer remain shrouded in darkness. 11. Our sensitization to the cruelty with which children are treated, until now commonly denied, and to the consequences of such treatment will as a matter of course bring an end to the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation. 12. People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be -- both in their youth and in adulthood -- intelligent, responsive, empathic and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their own children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience, and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. It will be inconceivable to such people that earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel comfortable and safe in this world. Since it will not be their unconscious drive in life to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and creatively.
Absurd | Abuse | Anger | Behavior | Blame | Body | Childhood | Children | Consequences | Cruelty | Desire | Doubt | Emotions | Experience | Feelings | Honesty | Ignorance | Industry | Influence | Integrity | Intimidation | Kill | Knowledge | Life | Life | Light | Logic | Love | Memory | Need | Opportunity | Order | Pain | Parents | People | Pleasure | Power | Principles | Regard | Respect | Revenge | Safe | Society | Tenderness | War | Will | Youth | Cruelty | Society | Following | Respect | Youth | Child | Guilty |
Research shows the presence of women raises the standards of ethical behavior and lowers corruption.
Behavior |