Hans-Georg Gadamer Quotes

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.

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

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.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.

The family you were raised in, the time period you were born in, and the part of the country you're in absolutely shape your view on sex, which shapes a huge part of anybody's personality.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?

Man is a child of his environment.

In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.

I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.

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

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

You think you know who you are, and then other people have these other ideas.

I focused on how these people became how they were.

Once we accept violence as an adaptation, it makes sense that its expression is calibrated to the environment. The same individual will behave differently if he comes of age in Detroit, Mich., versus Windsor, Ontario; in New York in the 1980s versus New York now; in a culture of honor versus a culture of dignity.