Paul Collier Quotes

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

People aren't autonomous creatures. They're under a lot of pressure themselves.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

Ultimately peer pressure can lead people to bully, but peer pressure can also say bullying is not acceptable.

A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

When we were growing up, all of us kids were vegetarians. No one had asked me to stop eating meat - I just noticed everyone else around me had stopped, so I followed the crew.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

Peers often matter more than parents.

Americans use custom, more than written law, to enforce virtue

Peer pressure is a huge part of youth behavior, whether one grows up in Washington, D.C., or Cody, Wyo.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.

Leaders set the tone for their peers. Peers look up to them and say, 'They're doing it, so I'm doing it.'

I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion-the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is to work the engines.