Carolyn See Quotes

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

In any group there is more or less tension between people, and there are complicities and affinities.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it's at a party or it's in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

I never liked group work in school.

The only thing I learnt in high school is that people are very violent and territorial.

Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed, or quarreled in troops and companies.

Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.

When you have a group of 30 people together, there's going to be people who don't like each other. That's just simple facts.

The reason that fish form schools, birds form flocks, and bees form swarms is that they are smarter together than they would be apart. They don't take a vote; they don't take a poll: they form a system. They are all interactive and make a decision together in real time.

One thing that I've noticed about big families is that they usually break down into two camps: the talkers and the watchers.

I think the boarding schools are like miniature versions of "Lord of the Flies."

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

Everybody likes the new guy. Being the new guy is cool. But then when you're there for a couple months, you're just the cool guy. I think I'm just the cool guy.

The only thing you have to watch out for is other people who feel threatened by your party.

Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.

Walking over to Iggy, he poked him with his shoe. "Does anysing on you vork properly?" Iggy rubbed his forehead with one hand. "Well, I have a highly developed sense of irony." Ter Borcht tsked. "You are a liability to your group. I assume you alvays hold onto someone's shirt, yes? Following dem closely?" "Only when I'm trying to steal their dessert," Iggy said truthfully.

The group of guys I have... They are playing off straight motivation.

Dancing?' Annabeth asked. Thalia nodded. She cocked her ear to the music and made a face. 'Ugh. Who chose Jesse McCartney?' Grover looked hurt. 'I did.

Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others.

... members of a powerful group are raised to believe (however illogically) that whatever affects it will also affect them. On theother hand, members of less powerful groups are raised to believe (however illogically) that each individual can escape the group's fate. Thus, cohesion is encouraged on the one hand, and disunity is fostered on the other.

It doesn't always turn out. It's not always a happy ending when sometimes you say things that you think, and it goes against the grain of the larger group.