Michel Onfray Quotes

Man is a child of his environment.

We are such a product of our upbringing and environment.

We're all products of our own environment.

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.

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

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?

I really do believe in the influence of your surroundings.

A lot of times you're just conditioned by what's around you.

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.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

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

I don't believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything - I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I'd been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos.

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.

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.

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

I think you are a product of the environment you surround yourself in, and everything you've experienced is a part of you and the fabric you are in.

To be sure, we have inherited abilities, but our development we owe to thousands of influences coming from the world around us from which we appropriate what we can and what is suitable to us.

I'm just a product of my environment, and it comes out in the music.

I think that you form the way that you act from others around you; it's a kind of an environmental thing.

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

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.

The family you were raised in, the time period you were born in, and the part of the country you're in absolutely shape your view on sex, which shapes a huge part of anybody's personality.

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.

We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.

How we behave in our public lives inevitably reflects values, attitudes and experiences embedded in our private lives and vice versa.