Jacque Fresco Quotes

What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.

It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived.

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Facilities was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other or farther Enquiries.

Culture is your operating system.

A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions.

What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Laws are never as effective as habits.

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

A lot of times you're just conditioned by what's around you.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains--chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment--in a word, Circumstance--and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

The principles and passions of men are always the same and lead to the same result, varying only according to the circumstances in which they are placed.

What people will - or will not - laugh at is mainly determined by their social conditioning.

No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns.

Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.