Curiosity doesn't matter any more. These days people don't want to be transported to emotional territories where they don't know h...ow to react.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A child who fears excessive retaliation for even minor offenses will learn very early on that to lie is to protect himself.... If ...your child intuits that you will react very punitively to his wrongdoing, he may be tempted to lie and may become, as time goes on, a habitual liar.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo- a...nd heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some animals, especially domesticated animals, are extremely susceptible to signs. A dog will react to the slightest change in the... behavior of his master; he will even distinguish the expressions of a human face or the modulations of a human voice. But it is far cry from these phenomena to an understanding of symbolic and human speech.... Symbols--in the proper sense of this term--cannot be reduced to mere signals. Signals and symbols belong to two different universes of discourse: a signal is a part of the physical world of being; a symbol is a part of the human world of meaning. Signals are "operators"; symbols are "designators."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and ...lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a televion set.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the "American Way of Life" is a fossil of history. What do they care... if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiffassed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frug, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragassing across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Temperament refers to the mode of reaction and is constitutional and not changeable; character is essentially formed by a person's... experiences, especially of those in early life, and changeable, to some extent, by insights and new kinds of experiences. If a person has a choleric temperament, for instance, his mode of reaction is "quick and strong." But what he is quick or strong about depends on his kind of relatedness, his character. If he is a productive, just, loving person he will react quickly and strongly when he loves, when he is enraged by injustice, and when he is impressed by a new idea. If he is a destructive or sadistic character, he will be quick and strong in his destructiveness or in his cruelty. The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste. But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting that ...most of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the body reacts in a purposeful way to wounds or infections or an abnormal way of living, so the psychic functions react t...o unnatural or injurious disturbances with appropriate means of defence. One of these purposeful reactions is the dream, in which the unconscious material constellated round a given conscious position is presented to the conscious mind in symbolic form. In this unconscious material are all those associations which have remained in the unconscious because they were only weakly emphasized but which nevertheless have sufficient energy to make themselves felt during sleep. Naturally the purposeful character of the dream-content cannot be directly seen from the manifest dream-content; it requires an analysis of this manifest content to reach the actual compensatory factors of the latent dream-content. But most physical defensive reactions are of the same scarcely recognizable and, so to speak, indirect nature, and their purposeful character also has only been recognized through deep investigation and exact observation. I might recall, for instance, the meaning of fever and the processes of suppuration in an infected wound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »