Eric Liu Quotes

Society becomes how we behave.

Science of Society

A code of behavior is an inevitable part of life in any community, and if we hadn't inherited ours, we should have had to invent one.

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.

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

Custom determines what is agreeable.

fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.

Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.

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.

Whenever two people come together and their behavior affects one another, you have etiquette.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

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

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

Every combination of two or more human beings has both a useful aspect and a political aspect.

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.

Man has been adjudged a social animal.

… the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts.

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

I was obsessed with learning about social behaviors. I remember explaining to my mom that kids on my soccer team were fighting because of dyads and triads.

All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities.

Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.