Norman Spinrad Quotes

Man is a child of his environment.

We are such a product of our upbringing and environment.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

It's true that your environment influences how you write.

We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

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 don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.

We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

On the other hand, ethnic psychology must always come to the assistance of individual psychology, when the developmental forms of the complex mental processes are in question.

Genes cannot tell us how to catalogue or comprehend human diversity. Environments can, cultures can, geographies can, histories can.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

Individuals often exercise considerable influence upon the fate of society, but this influence is determined by the internal structure of that society and by its relation to other societies

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

History is about what people do within the limits of their landscape, their needs, and their past.

Designers don't live in a vacuum; they are not blind to what's going on. They, too, will be inspired by what they see, and that will come out in their work.

We're all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us.