Honore de Balzac Quotes

Man is a child of his environment.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

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

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.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

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.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

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

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

Perhaps the most mysterious of all mammals is the male Homo sapiens. Indeed, many anthropologists classify the group as a subspecies.

We are such a product of our upbringing and environment.

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.

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.