Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

People don't always behave the same way on different programmes. If you go to church you don't behave the same way you do at a party in the middle of the night.

Is anyone human actually normal? I'm beginning to think being normal is actually abnormal.

I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.

I think it's ridiculous that you need to look a certain way to be conventionally pretty.

Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind. I dress my mind before you and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.

The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.

If you are really spontaneous, people will think you are mad. If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, people will think you are mad. If you go to a church and talk to a cross or to an image, nobody will think your are mad, they will think that you are religious. You are talking to a stone in a temple and everybody thinks you are religious because this is the authorized form.

I'm not like a politician that goes around talking about family values. And I can't get fired from being a funny person because I did something that most people are disapproving of. I think people are just obsessed with this morality that people perceive as being the right and wrong way of doing stuff.

I'm thinking balls are to men, what purses are to women. It's just a little bag but we'd feel naked in public without it.

Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.

Real people had real agendas, real demands, real expectations about how other people should behave.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.

So, "normal" is really what society dictates as normal and if we're born in that world, we would see that as normal. But if you think about it for a second, is it really?

Parents need to be more accepting of who their kids are and less concerned about what society thinks they need to be.

Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.

Women can always think as much as they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an' they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature.

In my mind of course natural disaster like tsunami, and these things, also I think indirectly may relate to human behavior. But then major sort of problems actually they're due to a lack of moral principle.

Babies and the old are permitted self-absorption. In between, it provokes resentment.

We must re-center philosophy within our frame of reference which I think is the way to deal with it.

Propriety is the least of all laws, and the most observed.

The best way to learn to be a lady is to see how other ladies do it.

Because everybody lies. It's part of living in society. Don't get me wrong-I think it's necessary. The last thing anyone wants is to live in a society where total honesty prevails. Can you imagine the conversations? You're short and fat, one person might say, and the other might answer, I know. But you smell bad. It just wouldn't work. So people lie by omission all the time. People will tell you most of the story...and I've learned that the part they neglect to tell you is often the most important part. People hide the truth because they're afraid." -Jo

Everybody sacrifices something in an attempt to reach what they think society wants.

When mankind goes back to treating people the way you want to be treated, things will settle, I don't see that happening. I treat people the way I want to be treated, which makes me odd.

Sometimes you can hear them talk, other times you can't. All the same old cliches, is that a woman or a man?