Situational Factors Quotes

I don't think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

As a rule it is circumstances that make men.

Always blame conditions, not men

There is no way of knowing for sure whether or not you can trust someone, for the simple reason that circumstances change all of the time.

Circumstances alter cases.

Leaders are made by the situations they are involved in. I think that some rise to the occasion and some do not.

Poor people aren't making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.

It is just as painful to me when I do poorly. If the fault is all mine, that's what's painful. If it's a situation where no one could have succeeded, I don't feel as bad.

Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed.

Every psychological event depends upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases

I think conditions on the ground determine what you need in a particular area.

The circumstances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape;--and by tightening it, or relaxing it, this way or that, make the thing to be, what it is--great--little--good--bad--indifferent or not indifferent, just as the case happens.

I think every case is different. Every situation is different. People come on the F.B.I.'s radar screen for a variety of reasons at a variety of times.

I think it's a mistake to try to pin down one particular reason for a person's personality. Don't we all, for many reasons, act differently in different circumstances and with different people?

We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.

Most of us fail to appreciate the extent to which our behavior is under situational control, because we prefer to believe that is all is internally generated. We wander around cloaked in an illusion of vulnerability, mis-armed with an arrogance of free will and rationality.

I think that everyone's life is controlled by a series of events. They choose what they want and if it is in their control they can reach it. Sometimes luck shines on them and sometimes it doesn't. I also think accidents happen and we are placed in situations where we have to do things for those we love that we don't want to do.

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

You must bear in mind that each law is circumstantial. It does depend on the circumstances.

Psychologists tested the story of the Good Samaritan. What they learned gives us reason to pause. The greatest determinant of who stopped to help the stranger in need was not compassion, morality, or religious creed. It was those who had the time. Makes me wonder if I have time to do good.

You have to talk about why things happened the way they did. You can't actually explain my political life except by a series of situations rather than by some carefully constructed, rigidly progressed ascendancy.

Men and women are brothers and sisters; they are not of different species; and what need be obtained to know both, but to allow for different modes of education, for situation and constitution, or perhaps I should rather say, for habits, whether good or bad.

All politicians, no matter how gifted, ultimately depend on circumstances for their success.

We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.