"Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute."
— Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings)

"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."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

"It is a sin to believe evil of others but it is seldom a mistake."
— Garrison Keillor

"The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire."
— Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point)

"Sometimes people will hear you and be able to change their behavior, but often their behavior has more to do with their own need for approval than with your need for support. No matter what their response, you need to be firm and hold your ground. At the end of the day, your health is your responsibility."
— Jillian Michaels (Winning by Losing: Drop the Weight, Change Your Life)

"Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday"
— Don Marquis

"The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person."
— P.J. O'Rourke

"Each act of our lives can contain simplicity and precision and thus can have tremendous beauty and dignity."
— Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

"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."
— Steven Pinker

"I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower"
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Chosen)

"Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them."
— Mildred Armstrong Kalish (Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression)

"The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective. "
— Warren Buffet

"Character is who you are when no one is looking and means having an inner standard that cares more about others"
— LEHMAN