Steve Allen Quotes

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

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

Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.

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

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.

I've always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

Man is a child of his environment.

As a five-year-old in Berlin in 1965, I didn't know that funny women existed. It wasn't until I got back to England that I realised women could be funny.

From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.

Ideology... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.

Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'

'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.

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.

America is a noisy culture, unlike, say, Finland, which values silence. Individualism, dominant in the U.S. and Germany, promotes the direct, fast-paced style of communication associated with extraversion. Collectivistic societies, such as those in East Asia, value privacy and restraint, qualities more characteristic of introverts.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

In some extremely important ways, people are what you expect them to be, or at least they behave as you expect them to behave.