George Pelecanos Quotes

It's other people who make us wise, and I haven't known nearly enough.

The world is shaped by different people with certain personalities that come out of different upbringings.

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

I feel like I'm always learning from people.

Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling from others.

I wanted to be liked when I was younger, which I think a lot of us do; I'm not ashamed to say it. I was a product of my environment, a product of my culture.

We're kind of influenced by all the different people we meet.

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

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

We found out that you can't pass on acquired things like bigotry, prejudice, greed. That's all learned in your culture or your sub-culture

Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.

It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame man, you will learn to limp.

How we treat other people changes them, but even more so, how we treat other people changes us.

People are social beings and want interaction and social learning is the primary form of learning, just as word of mouth advertising is the highest form of advertising.

People are not born heroes or villains; they’re created by the people around them.

People tend to think that big things only happen to big people ... I think that is not true. The small decisions we make every day define who we are and define the world around us. ... But I bet to you there is a decision every day in your life where you affect somebody else.

Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.

Now to what...? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.

There's people who actually have a whole science devoted to what makes a sticky meme and that idea of that question of why some ideas about how civilizations work catch on and others don't.

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.

I'd have to say no, people don't change, but they can learn to behave differently.

Our relations with others are not external. They enter into our very identity. And that's why people struggle with them so.

Whenever your life touches mine, you make me stronger of weaker... there is no escape... people drag others or lift others up.