Peter L. Berger Quotes

One thing I'm interested in is what shapes us: the people? The place where we live? It's both of those and more. That's what I keep coming back to.

If I'm in an unusual or extreme social environment, I always want to know what it's like to grow up there and experience it as normal, everyday life. And I want to know what sort of adults these children are going to turn into.

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

The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It's how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?

It is nature that is driving us towards perfection, and eventually she will bring everyone there.

Despite the never ending play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

In a social environment that is ever crowded and impersonal, it is becoming increasingly important to reconsider the value of close personal relationships before we are driven to ask the forlorn question, 'Whatever happened to love?'

One code prevails in the family; another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth, in the religious association. As a person passes from one of the environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is in danger of being split into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion for different occasions. This danger imposes upon the school a steadying and integrating office.

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

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.

I really felt the growth of myself as a human being, as a person [becoming a mother].

Nature is a definite thing. But nurture is just as powerful. It can really mess with you.

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

Don't attempt to reform man. An adequately organized environment will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful.

How can we truly understand who we are unless we know who we were and what we have the power to become?

But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.

Nature is stronger than education.

The soul is the lure of our becoming.

Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming.

Why does everyone take for granted that we don't learn to grow arms, but rather, are designed to grow arms? Similarly, we should conclude that in the case of the development of moral systems; there's a biological endowment which in effect requires us to develop a system of moral judgment and a theory of justice, if you like, that in fact has detailed applicability over an enormous range.