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The most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways. Some people have dark qualities that are especially pronounced. You cannot change such people at their core, but must merely avoid becoming their victim. You are an observer of the human comedy, and by being as tolerant as possible, you gain a much greater ability to understand people and to influence their behavior when necessary
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Robert Greene (Mastery)
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You cannot become a peacemaker without communication. Silence is a passive aggressive grenade thrown by insecure people that want war, but they don't want the accountability of starting it.
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Shannon L. Alder
“
It can be difficult to speak truth to power. Circumstances, however, have made doing so increasingly necessary.
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Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
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There is nothing virtuous or noble about being "tolerant" of people whose attitudes and behaviors you approve of. If you don't defend the freedom of even those individuals whose attitudes and behaviors you find disgusting, narrow-minded and offensive, then you are not tolerant. To "tolerate" doesn't mean you like it or approve of it; it means only that you ALLOW it to EXIST--i.e., you refrain from violently interfering. The people who look to "government" to FORCE people to be "nice" are not tolerant.
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Larken Rose
“
Julie marched over to Matt. She stood in front of him and crossed her arms. “Lift up your sweatshirt.”
Matt rolled his eyes. “God, you really know how to turn a guy on.”
Julie didn’t budge. “If I was trying to turn you on, I could do better than that. Now, lift up your sweatshirt.”
Matt looked up at her and tried to look serious. “Julie, I’m completely offended that you have so little faith in my honesty. I thought at this point in our friendship that you would at least—”
“Get up.” Julie leaned over and shut his laptop. “Get up!” she said again.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Matt said laughing, but he stood up. “I trust you implicitly, and it wouldn’t kill you to show me the same respect.”
“Show me!”
Matt sidestepped the chair and took a few steps backward. “You have quite the attitude today. Suspicious and mean.”
Julie took a step forward, causing Matt to continue backing away. “Lift up your shirt.”
“Look, I appreciate an aggressive woman, but this is really getting weird.”
Julie grabbed his sweatshirt by the waist cuff and lifted it up with one hand, as she pulled down his T-shirt with the other. Matt put his hands over hers, lightly protesting, but she refused to let go. “Aha!” She squinted at his shirt.
“OK, I don’t even know what this is, but it’s definitely geeky.
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Jessica Park (Flat-Out Love (Flat-Out Love, #1))
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Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!
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Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works)
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Creative nihilism, aggressive pity, total misanthropy.
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Willem Frederik Hermans
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Fighter pilot is an attitude. It is cockiness. It is aggressiveness. It is self-confidence. It is a streak of rebelliousness, and it is competitiveness. But there's something else - there's a spark. There's a desire to be good. To do well; in the eyes of your peers, and in your own mind.
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Robin Olds (Fighter Pilot: The Memoirs Of Legendary Ace Robin Olds)
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When a woman excels at her job, both male and female coworkers will remark that she may be accomplishing a lot, but is “not well-liked by her peers.” She is probably also “too aggressive,” “not a team player,” “a bit political,” “can’t be trusted,” or “difficult.
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Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
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Don’t live life as a spectator. Always examine life: Espouse new ideas, long for
new things, constantly discovering new interests, escaping from boring
routines. Engage life with enthusiasm; grasping life aggressively and squeezing
from it every drop of excitement, satisfaction, and joy. The key to unleashing life’s potential is attitude. The person who approaches
life with a child-like wonder is best prepared to defy the limitations of time, is
more “alive,” more of a participant in life than the person who remains a
spectator.
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Felix Baumgartner
“
Passive Aggression – Being covertly spiteful with the intent of inflicting mental pain.
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Ashta-Deb (Life Happens To Us: A True Story)
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Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents--'avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality'--we are going to deny men their full humanity. Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.
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bell hooks (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love)
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Condition a man (or a woman) to value aggression above all other virtues, and you will produce a character type whose most readily expressed emotion will be anger. Condition a woman (or a man) to value submission above all other attitudes and you will produce a character type whose most readily expressed emotion will be sadness.
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Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man)
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I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.
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Richard Wright (Black Boy)
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Carrying an aggressive attitude is to expect cool shadow under a naked Tree
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Samar Sudha
“
We now know that gut microbes are part of this axis, in both directions. Since the 1970s, a trickle of studies have shown that any kind of stress – starvation, sleeplessness, being separated from one’s mother, the sudden arrival of an aggressive individual, uncomfortable temperatures, overcrowding, even loud noises – can change a mouse’s gut microbiome. The opposite is also true: the microbiome can affect a host’s behaviour, including its social attitudes and its ability to deal with stress.40
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Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
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What’s more important than the decision you make is your attitude and your effort after it’s made. That’s what determines your results. The person with the most aggressive attitude and the most relentless effort usually wins.
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Darrin Donnelly (Victory Favors the Fearless: How to Defeat the 7 Fears That Hold You Back (Sports for the Soul Book 5))
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The secret of financial success is the willingness to adopt a warrior spirit in attitude, grace, and presence. This does not mean adopting an air of aggressiveness, but rather, a spirit of making treaties and pacts with oneself and others. “Warriors have an outlook of expecting a positive outcome, and a willingness to do whatever is needed to incur that outcome. It means not giving up, but allowing for flexibility, and to flow with the energy or chi as it moves along. Be strong, be vigilant for success, and be sensitive to the energy undercurrents, and you shan’t go wrong.
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Doreen Virtue (Archangels and Ascended Masters)
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Well over 1,000 studies point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting. Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.
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Dave Grossman (On Killing)
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The central attitudes driving Rambo are:
Strength and aggressiveness are good; compassion and conflict resolution are bad.
Anything that could be even remotely associated with homosexuality, including walking away from possible violence or showing any fear or grief, has to be avoided at any cost.
Femaleness and femininity (which he associates with homosexuality) are inferior. Women are here to serve men and be protected by them.
Men should never hit women, because it is unmanly to do so. However, exceptions to this rule can be made for my own partner if her behavior is bad enough. Men need to keep their women in line.
You are a thing that belongs to me, akin to a trophy.
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Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men)
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I underestimated this guy. He plays the game well. Of course he does. He’s had years of adulthood – where everyone smiles when they hate someone and bottles up their emotions – to practice in. He’s a master of passive-aggressive-bullshit-taekwondo. And I’m more a master of the aggressive style.
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Sara Wolf (Savage Delight (Lovely Vicious, #2))
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An anarchist society is by definition a Free Society, but a Free Society is not necessarily Anarchist. It might fall short in several respects. Some failings might seriously limit its desirability. For instance, a Revolution carried out by men in a male-dominated society, might perpetuate sex discrimination, which would limit freedom and undermine the Revolution by leaving it possible for aggressive attitudes to be fostered. The liberal illusion that repressive forces must be tolerated which will ultimately wipe out all freedom -- lest the right to dissent be imperilled -- could well destroy the revolution.
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Albert Meltzer (Anarchism: Arguments For and Against)
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For within the very structure of family life, in families that do or did embrace the male religions, are the almost invisibly accepted social customs and life patterns that reflect the one-time strict adherence to the biblical scriptures. Attitudes towards double-standard premarital virginity, double-standard marital fidelity, the sexual autonomy of women, illegitimacy, abortion, contraception, rape, childbirth, the importance of marriage and children to women, the responsibilities and role of women in marriage, women as sex objects, the sexual identification of passivity and aggressiveness, the roles of women and men in work or social situations, women who express their ideas, female leadership, the intellectual activities of women, the economic activities and needs of women and the automatic assumption of the male as breadwinner and protector have all become so deeply ingrained that feelings and values concerning these subjects are often regarded, by both women and men, as natural tendencies or even human instinct.
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Merlin Stone (When God Was a Woman)
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Our attitude towards sin is not to cuddle with it, but be aggressively violent towards it. If
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Jason M. Garwood (Be Holy: Learning the Path of Sanctification)
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Positive attitudes only come by intentional, deliberate invitation. We must aggressively grab every opportunity to fulfill our destinies in Christ.
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Michelle McClain-Walters (The Deborah Anointing: Embracing the Call to be a Woman of Wisdom and Discernment)
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Retaliation does not balance things, since it harms the soul of the retaliator and creates a more severe imbalance. Socrates noticed this peril and wrote: “It is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one.” This is because the body and mind are damaged by injustice from others, but it is our own soul that is damaged by revenge. A spiritually evolved adult is not cutthroat and does not believe that all is fair in love and war. He does not claw his way to the top but acts kindly at any rung of the ladder. He has personal ambition but not at the expense of others. This is an example of a moral standard becoming more important than success in the material world. The joy of a good conscience is the highest value for those who want to grow spiritually. With spiritual practice, our attitude toward an aggressor becomes compassion for the suffering dimension in his aggression. This response also serves to quiet him down.
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David Richo (The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them)
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The average person wastes his life. He has a great deal of energy but he wastes it. The life of an average person seems at the end utterly meaningless…without significance. When he looks back…what has he done?
MIND
The mind creates routine for its own safety and convenience. Tradition becomes our security. But when the mind is secure it is in decay. We all want to be famous people…and the moment we want to be something…we are no longer free.
Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential…the what is. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything new…and in that there’s joy. To awaken this capacity in oneself and in others is real education.
SOCIETY
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals…whereas culture has invented a single mold to which we must conform. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person because he conforms to a pattern. He repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. What happens to your heart and your mind when you are merely imitative, naturally they wither, do they not?
The great enemy of mankind is superstition and belief which is the same thing. When you separate yourself by belief tradition by nationally it breeds violence. Despots are only the spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power which is in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared there will be confusion and classes…hate and wars. A man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country to any religion to any political party. He is concerned with the understanding of mankind.
FEAR
You have religion. Yet the constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. You can only be afraid of what you think you know. One is never afraid of the unknown…one is afraid of the known coming to an end. A man who is not afraid is not aggressive. A man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free and peaceful mind.
You want to be loved because you do not love…but the moment you really love, it is finished. You are no longer inquiring whether someone loves you or not.
MEDITATION
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
In meditation you will discover the whisperings of your own prejudices…your own noises…the monkey mind. You have to be your own teacher…truth is a pathless land. The beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are…where you are going…what the end is.
Down deep we all understand that it is truth that liberates…not your effort to be free. The idea of ourselves…our real selves…is your escape from the fact of what you really are. Here we are talking of something entirely different….not of self improvement…but the cessation of self.
ADVICE
Take a break with the past and see what happens. Release attachment to outcomes…inside you will feel good no matter what. Eventually you will find that you don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom…it is timeless spiritual truth.
If you can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it. The answer is not separate from the problem. Suffer and understand…for all of that is part of life. Understanding and detachment…this is the secret.
DEATH
There is hope in people…not in societies not in systems but only in you and me. The man who lives without conflict…who lives with beauty and love…is not frightened by death…because to love is to die.
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J. Krishnamurti (Think on These Things)
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It seems like deep inside, I actually hate people.
It just seems that my own attitude, my own goals in life prevent me from saying anything at all.
Their insults make them stupid, while they make me stronger. Their aggressive actions hurt me, but make me hard like rock.
What's the use of being part of their isults and actions? Being reasonable and quiet is better than being senseless like others.
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Vanessa Carreon
“
Transposed to the social sphere, holism becomes apparent as a rebalancing of values and attitudes that have become distorted -- moving from aggressive to responsive, from predominantly masculine to a balance with the feminine, from competitive toward cooperative, from primarily rational toward intuitive, from analyzing toward synthesizing. These are not either/or dichotomies, as nature, an ever-present model for wholeness, reveals.
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Alex Gerber Jr. (Wholeness : On Education, Buckminster Fuller, and Tao)
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It's this oppressive, aggressive and exclusice side to cool that makes me declare ardently, no I'm not cool. I rebel against the notion of a standard or style or attitude that oppresses those that don't fit in- that excludes and diminishes the vulnerable, the shy, the uninformed and the uncofident. I rebel, too, against the dominance of a set of values which seems so geared towards the superficial and ephemeral. And I rebel against the idea of being cool if it means being detatched, distant, univolved, dismissive, unresponsive, lacking in emotional honesty- in fact, lacking in all the things that make the world a happier, more sympathetic place.
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John Farndon (Do You Think You're Clever?: The Oxford and Cambridge Questions)
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Reviewing our experiences, we had become more and more convinced that carrying arms was not only unnecessary in most grizzly country but was certainly no good for the desired atmosphere and proper protocol in obtaining good film records. If we were to obtain such film and fraternize successfully with the big bears, it would be better to go unarmed in most places. The mere fact of having a gun within reach, cached somewhere in a pack or a hidden holster, causes a man to act with unconscious arrogance and thus maybe to smell different or to transmit some kind of signal objectionable to bears. The armed man does not assume his proper role in association with the wild ones, a fact of which they seem instantly aware at some distance. He, being wilder than they, whether he likes to admit it or not, is instantly under even more suspicion than he would encounter if unarmed. One must follow the role of an uninvited visitor—an intruder—rather than that of an aggressive hunter, and one should go unarmed to insure this attitude.
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John McPhee (Coming into the Country)
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The repeated attempts that have been made to improve humanity - in particular to make it more peacable - have failed, because nobody has understood the full depth and vigour of the instincts of aggression innate in each individual. Such efforts do not seek to do more than encourage the positive, well-wishing impulses of the person while denying or suppressing his aggressive ones. And so they have been doomed to failure from the beginning. But psychoanalysis has different means at its disposal for a task of this kind. It cannot, it is true, altogether do away with man's aggressive instinct as such; but it can, by diminishing the anxiety which accentuates those instincts, break up the mutual reinforcement that is going on all the time between his hatred and his fear. When, in our analytic work, we are always seeing how the resolution of early infantile anxiety not only lessens and modifies the child's aggressive impulses, but leads to a more valuable employment and gratification of them from a social point of view; how the child shows an ever-grwing, deeply rooted desire to be loved and to love, and to be at peace with the world about it; and how much pleasure and benefit, and what a lessening of anxiety it derives from the fulfilment of this desire - when we see all this, we are ready to believe that what now would seem a Utopian state of things may well come true in those distant days when, as I hope, child-analysis will become as much a part of every person's upbringing as school-education is now. Then, perhaps, that hostile attitude, springing from fear and suspicion, which is latent more or less strongly in each human being, and which intensifies a hundredfold in him every impulse of destruction, will give way to kindlier and more trustful feelings towards his fellowmen, and people may inhabit the world together in greater peace and goodwill than they do now.
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Melanie Klein (Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921-1945 (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1))
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Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes
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Raymond Chandler (The Simple Art of Murder)
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The Cretans’ more natural attitudes toward sex would also have had other consequences equally difficult to perceive under the prevailing paradigm, wherein religious dogma often views sex as more sinful than violence. As Hawkes writes, “The Cretans seem to have reduced and diverted their aggressiveness through a free and well-balanced sexual life.”33 Along with their enthusiasm for sports and dancing and their creativity and love of life, these liberated attitudes toward sex seem to have contributed to the generally peaceful and harmonious spirit predominant in Cretan life.
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Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Updated With a New Epilogue))
“
What else annoys you about Glasgow?’ I ask. ‘Immigrants,’ says one, to which the other nods in agreement. ‘What is it about immigrants that annoys you?’ I ask. ‘They come here and take jobs and houses when we have enough homeless people on our streets.’ ‘They rape people.’ ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to speak in their own language.’ ‘If they are running away from a war then maybe they should stay in their own countries and fight?’ ‘If they hate Britain then why come here?’ Within two minutes, these normally mute, unresponsive, passive-aggressive boys suddenly spring to life and reveal to me an issue they are not only passionate about but clearly believe themselves to be knowledgeable on. It’s just a shame they are racist. Racist attitudes like these, often learned at home, are carried into adulthood before being passed on to the next generation. Which is why many are anxious about conceding ground to people with ‘legitimate’ concerns about immigration.
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Darren McGarvey (Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass)
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It would be nice to comfort ourselves with thoughts of how much the Christian religion has progressed from the violent times discussed in this chapter, but that would be a false comfort. It is my conviction that many conservative Christian groups refrain from killing, not because they have matured, but because the institutional church has lost the power it once had. Violent attitudes may be muted in today's world, but they find ways to reemerge in different forms. Listen to the sermons and sound bites of many popular Christian leaders today and you will notice the same aggressive, angry, and uncharitable attitudes lingering beneath the surface.
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Bruxy Cavey (The End of Religion: Encountering the Subversive Spirituality of Jesus)
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For some, the conviction that they “know the truth” produces in them an aggressive attitude that reeks of superiority and is very off-putting. They forget that the One about whom they profess to be witnessing – he who was the truth (John 14:6) – was the most gentle of men. He was gentle and lowly in heart (Matthew 11:29). But this clearly does not mean that he was a soppy, insipid, and spineless pushover. Christ was full of moral courage and authority, and showed (righteous) anger when necessary. But he was always courteous and respectful. Those of us who find it very difficult to respect or be gentle with those who disagree with us need to put a lot of effort into learning how to be like that.
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John C. Lennox (Against the Flow: The inspiration of Daniel in an age of relativism)
“
Correlative to the impulse of aggression is the impulse of resistance to aggression. This impulse is exemplified in the attitude of the Israelites to the Philistines or of medieval Europe to the Mohammedans. The beliefs which it produces are beliefs in the peculiar wickedness of those whose aggression is feared, and in the immense value of national customs which they might suppress if they were victorious. When the war broke out, all the reactionaries in England and France began to speak of the danger to democracy, although until that moment they had opposed democracy with all their strength. They were not insincere in so speaking: the impulse of resistance to Germany made them value whatever was endangered by the German attack. They loved democracy because they hated Germany; but they thought they hated Germany because they loved democracy.
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Bertrand Russell (The Bertrand Russell Collection)
“
Perhaps no expression better encapsulates our attitude towards conflict (or its avoidance) than, “let's agree to disagree.” It is a neat, friendly and oddly poetic little piece of language, yet it also a miraculously dense blackhole of passive-aggression expressed at its very finest. It still says “you are wrong,” of course, but it also says, “you will continue to be wrong, perhaps forever, but unfortunately I’ve run out of time, energy and patience to unpack your wrongness.
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Paul Hawkins (The Bloody British: A Well-Meaning Guide to an Awkward Nation)
“
In a student culture promoting the increasingly militant silencing of girls' voices and objections, there is often little to challenge such attitudes as they flourish (and any objection is conveniently deflected by the stereotype of whining, moaning women). Meanwhile this cocktail of prejudice is mixed against the normalizing wider backdrop of yet more gender imbalance and casual sexism, as street harassment and similar displays of chauvinism are routinely witnessed. From seeing disparate pieces of women's bodies co-opted to advertise products, to hearing them referred to as mere numbers on a scale out of ten, these young men have been encouraged at every turn to dehumanize their female peers and classmates and to consider them merely as objects.
In just the same way that it is wrong to blame the victims of sexism, it is important too to acknowledge the extent to which these cultural factors combine to powerfully persuade young men that aggressive sexism is their expected role.
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Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism)
“
I am not a man of my time. In fact I find it hard not to declare myself its enemy. Not, as I often remark, that I fail to understand it. My comment is merely a pious one. Because I am easy-going I prefer not to be aggressive or hostile and therefore I say that I do not understand those matters which I ought to say I hate or despise. I have sharp ears but I pretend to be hard of hearing, finding as I do that is more elegant to feign this handicap than to admit that I have heard some vulgar sound
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Joseph Roth (The Emperor's Tomb (Von Trotta Family, #2))
“
Don’t live life as a spectator. Always examine life: Espouse new ideas, long for new things, constantly discovering new interests, escaping from boring routines. Engage life with enthusiasm; grasping life aggressively and squeezing from it every drop of excitement, satisfaction, and joy. The key to unleashing life’s potential is attitude. The person who approaches life with a child-like wonder is best prepared to defy the limitations of time, is more “alive,” more of a participant in life than the person who remains a spectator.
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Felix Baumgartner
“
My approach to training echoed how I climbed. The romance of climbing didn’t interest me. I didn’t seek harps and wings. I heard no opera up there. Instead, my mountains had teeth. The jagged edge we walked up there dragged itself across my throat, and the throats of my friends and peers. I took the mountains’ indifference to life as aggression, and fought back. I armored myself against that indifference; with training, with thinking, with attitude. I trained with friends who shared a similar approach. Our mantra was dark, but it motivated us. When we ran we breathed in rhythm—no matter the speed—and that beat had words: “They all died.” We inhaled and exhaled the great alpine epics—like the tragedy that befell Walter Bonatti’s party on the Freney Pillar—to push ourselves to a place where we would never come up short, physically. The consequences of falling short made training important. I realized early that controlling the things that I could control gave me greater freedom to address the things that I could not control. And the mountains offered those in spades.
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Steve House (Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete)
“
Carmen told me he had kissed her only four times since he returned from military service, in the spring. She added, with irritation, "Maybe he's not a man."
I didn't know anything about the dark depths that men could have, none of us did, and so for any confusing manifestation we had recourse to that formula.
Some wanted us in ways that were aggressive, subordinate, heedless, attentive - but that they wanted us there was no doubt. Others had - according to equally diverse attitudes - an aloof self-possession, as if between us and them there were a wall and the work of scaling it were our job.
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Elena Ferrante (The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2))
“
I’ve noticed before that people from New York and L.A. tend to have an attitude about their cities, a kind of survivor’s confidence that says, I’m from Real Life, and if you live in this hick town, you’re not even in the game. Always before I’d found this kind of amusing; Miami natives, after all, are just as rude and aggressive as New Yorkers, and just as sun-drenched and vacuous as Angelenos, and the combination is a unique and lethal challenge every time you drive. But something about the way Jackie said it made me feel a little bit provincial, and I wanted to say something to defend the ferocity of Miami traffic.
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Jeff Lindsay (Dexter's Final Cut (Dexter, #7))
“
Those with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style tend to show higher levels of self-reliance, a reduced signaling of need for others, and a distancing, detached attitude toward parents or partners. In children, avoidance is related to aggression, antisocial behaviors, and inflated self-esteem. In adults, avoidance is related to low commitment in romantic relationships, avoidance of intimacy, higher levels of sexual coercion, and a more promiscuous, sexually unrestrained orientation.89 Dismissive-avoidant attachment bears the hallmark of a low-parenting strategy, favoring short-term relationships over intimate, long-term bonding.
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Glenn Geher (Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love)
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Adorno and his colleagues identified nine a priori clusters of personality dimensions—many surprisingly similar to Dicks’s “High F Syndrome”—that made up the authoritarian personality: 1. Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values. 2. Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group. 3. Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish, people who violate conventional values. 4. Anti-Intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded. 5. Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories. 6. Power and “Toughness”: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis on the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness. 7. Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalized hostility, vilification of the human. 8. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses. 9. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings-on.
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James Waller (Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing)
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If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The
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Joe Domanick (Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing)
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socialised to be stoic, competitive, dominant and aggressive, the APA observes, have been proven to be less likely to engage in healthy behaviours, such as accessing preventative health care or looking after themselves – a tendency that extends to seeking out psychological help. However, even in the face of robust evidence that ‘men who bought into traditional notions of masculinity were more negative about seeking mental health services than those with more flexible gender attitudes’, MRAs prefer to die on the hill of defending those very same ‘traditional notions of masculinity’ than recognise that this could be a huge potential step towards tackling one of the greatest issues facing men today. They are, in other words, some of the most robust defenders of the precise problems they claim to want to eradicate.
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Laura Bates (Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How it Affects Us All)
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Having a TV—which gives you the ability to receive information—fails to establish any capacity for sending information in the opposite direction. And the odd one-way nature of the primary connection Americans now have to our national conversation has a profound impact on their basic attitude toward democracy itself. If you can receive but not send, what does that do to your basic feelings about the nature of your connection to American self-government? “Attachment theory” is an interesting new branch of developmental psychology that sheds light on the importance of consistent, appropriate, and responsive two-way communication—and why it is essential for an individual’s feeling empowered. First developed by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, in 1958, attachment theory was further developed by his protégée Mary Ainsworth and other experts studying the psychological development of infants. Although it applies to individuals, attachment theory is, in my view, a metaphor that illuminates the significance of authentic free-flowing communication in any relationship that requires trust. By using this new approach, psychologists were able to discover that every infant learns a crucial and existential lesson during the first year of life about his or her fundamental relationship to the rest of the world. An infant develops an attachment pathway based on different patterns of care and, according to this theory, learns to adopt one of three basic postures toward the universe: In the best case, the infant learns that he or she has the inherent ability to exert a powerful influence on the world and evoke consistent, appropriate responses by communicating signals of hunger or discomfort, happiness or distress. If the caregiver—more often than not the mother—responds to most signals from the infant consistently and appropriately, the infant begins to assume that he or she has inherent power to affect the world. If the primary caregiver responds inappropriately and/or inconsistently, the infant learns to assume that he or she is powerless to affect the larger world and that his or her signals have no intrinsic significance where the universe is concerned. A child who receives really erratic and inconsistent responses from a primary caregiver, even if those responses are occasionally warm and sensitive, develops “anxious resistant attachment.” This pathway creates children who feature anxiety, dependence, and easy victimization. They are easily manipulated and exploited later in life. In the worst case, infants who receive no emotional response from the person or persons responsible for them are at high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior as they grow up. Chronic unresponsiveness leads to what is called “anxious avoidance attachment,” a life pattern that features unquenchable anger, frustration, and aggressive, violent behavior.
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Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
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In my long life, Ryadd, I have seen many variations—configurations—of behaviour and attitude, and I have seen a person change from one to the other—when experience has proved damaging enough, or when the inherent weaknesses of one are recognized, leading to a wholesale rejection of it. Though, in turn, weaknesses of different sorts exist in the other, and often these prove fatal pitfalls. We are complex creatures, to be sure. The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words.
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Steven Erikson (Dust of Dreams (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #9))
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In my long life, Ryadd, I have seen many variations – configurations – of behaviour and attitude, and I have seen a person change from one to the other – when experience has proved damaging enough, or when the inherent weaknesses of one are recognized, leading to a wholesale rejection of it. Though, in turn, weaknesses of different sorts exist in the other, and often these prove fatal pitfalls. We are complex creatures, to be sure. The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words.’ ‘Passive.’ ‘Of a sort, yes. It is more a matter of warning off potential adversaries. In effect, you are saying: Be careful how close you tread. You cannot hurt me, but if I am pushed hard enough, I will wound you. In some things you must never yield, but these things are not eternally changeless or explicitly inflexible; rather, they are yours to decide upon, yours to reshape if you deem it prudent. They are immune to the pressure of others, but not indifferent to their arguments. Weigh and gauge at all times, and decide for yourself value and worth. But when you sense that a line has been crossed by the other person, when you sense that what is under attack is, in fact, your self-esteem, then gird yourself and stand firm.
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Steven Erikson (Dust of Dreams (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #9))
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First: I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my definite purpose, therefore I demand of myself persistent, aggressive and continuous action toward its attainment. Second: I realize that the dominating thoughts of my mind eventually reproduce themselves in outward, bodily action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality, therefore I will concentrate My mind for thirty minutes daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to be, by creating a mental picture of this person and then transforming that picture into reality through practical service. Third: I know that through the principle of Autosuggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means of realizing it, therefore I shall devote ten minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of the factors named in the sixteen lessons of this Reading Course on the Law of Success. Fourth: I have clearly mapped out and written down a description of my definite purpose in life, for the coming five years. I have set a price on my services for each of these five years; a price that I intend to earn and receive, through strict application of the principle of efficient, satisfactory service which I will render in advance. Fifth: I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless built upon truth and justice, therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects. I will succeed by attracting to me the forces I wish to use, and the co-operation of other people. I will induce others to serve me because I will first serve them. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness and cynicism by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in myself. I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory and repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my entire life so that I will become a successful and happy worker in my chosen field of endeavor.
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Napoleon Hill (Law of Success in 15 Lessons (2020 edition))
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JANUARY 29 Colossians 3:15-17 Offering Thanks Do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks. COLOSSIANS 3:17 IN WORD Hebrews 12:28 says that gratitude is an acceptable offering to God. Why? Because it acknowledges who He is better than any other attitude. It recognizes that He is a Blesser, a Giver, and a Redeemer of incomparable worth. Gratitude sees God as He is. Gratitude especially sees God accurately when it sees Him through Jesus. After all, the Incarnation was God’s plan to make Himself visible to human eyes. It was His aggressive strategy to make Himself accessible to sinners in need of salvation. Jesus is the ultimate act of God in this world. For the early church, Jesus quickly became the identity of the believer. Paul, for example, saw himself to be crucified with Him, buried with Him, raised up with Him, exalted with Him, seated in heavenly places with Him, and united with Him forever. When someone is that identified with his Redeemer, the attitude of his heart becomes a clear statement of the Redeemer’s worth. If gratitude isn’t there, the Redeemer isn’t worth much to that person. If we value Jesus as our identity, we will be exceedingly grateful for what He means to us. IN DEED You may faithfully make offerings of money and time, but what are you offering God with your attitude? Is it an acceptable offering, declaring His worth accurately? Or does it underestimate His value in your life by neglecting the thankfulness due Him? Or were you even aware that the attitudes of your heart are, whether you mean it or not, a statement about Him and an offering to Him? Watch your heart carefully. Whatever fills it will soon dominate your life and experience. With that in mind, let thankfulness flow from within as a sacrifice to God. Insist that your heart make statements of truth about your Redeemer, acknowledging the enormous sacrifice He made in order to offer you enormous glory. Recognize the salvation—the utterly complete, comprehensive salvation—that now defines your life. Whatever you do, do it in His name with thanks for who He is. The best way to show my gratitude to God is to accept everything, even my problems, with joy. —Mother Teresa
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Chris Tiegreen (The One Year God with Us Devotional: 365 Daily Bible Readings to Empower Your Faith)
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There presently exist three recognized conceptualizations of the antisocial construct: antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), dissocial personality disorder in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10; World Health Organization, 1992), and psychopathy as formalized by Hare with the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003). A conundrum for therapists is that these conceptualizations are overlapping but not identical, emphasizing different symptom clusters.
The DSM-5 emphasizes the overt conduct of the patient through a criteria set that includes criminal behavior, lying, reckless and impulsive behavior, aggression, and irresponsibility in the areas of work and finances. In contrast, the criteria set for dissocial personality disorder is less focused on conduct and includes a mixture of cognitive signs (e.g., a tendency to blame others, an attitude of irresponsibility), affective signs (e.g., callousness, inability to feel guilt, low frustration tolerance), and interpersonal signs (e.g., tendency to form relationships but not maintain them). The signs and symptoms of psychopathy are more complex and are an almost equal blend of the conduct and interpersonal/affective aspects of functioning. The two higher-order factors of the PCL-R reflect this blend. Factor 1, Interpersonal/Affective, includes signs such as superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulation, grandiosity, lack of remorse and empathy, and shallow affect. Factor 2, Lifestyle/Antisocial, includes thrill seeking, impulsivity, irresponsibility, varied criminal activity, and disinhibited behavior (Hare & Neumann, 2008). Psychopathy can be regarded as the most severe of the three disorders. Patients with psychopathy would be expected to also meet criteria for ASPD or dissocial personality disorder, but not everyone diagnosed with ASPD or dissocial personality disorder will have psychopathy (Hare, 1996; Ogloff, 2006).
As noted by Ogloff (2006), the distinctions among the three antisocial conceptualizations are such that findings based on one diagnostic group are not necessarily applicable to the others and produce different prevalence rates in justice-involved populations. Adding a further layer of complexity, therapists will encounter patients who possess a mixture of features from all three diagnostic systems rather than a prototypical presentation of any one disorder.
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Aaron T. Beck (Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders)
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Until knowledge becomes part of you, it is not possible to talk about awareness, or true understanding. Everything must come from and into an organism. Theories are only valid when made organic — ”organic” as in "part of the body".
The knowledge that has to be learned and followed like a discipline is useless. It doesn't matter which amount of knowledge you absorb or in which variety. Knowledge can’t be remembered all the time in the same proportion that is kept, not all of it, and not all of it at the same time. As a matter of fact, when knowledge is not assimilated above personal interests, that same knowledge is already corrupted.
When knowledge is seen as a means to a goal, either it is in obtaining something from the outside world, or passing some test, this knowledge has not become organic but merely used as a tool. That's why so many people avoid being confronted with their ignorance and react angrily when faced with their contradictions, which is quite obvious when we compare what they learn and what they say.
You see this everywhere, in teachers, politicians, religious groups, and so on. And then you wonder why are people not honest. But they can’t understand honesty as much as they can’t understand their own ignorance. The stupid are not aware they are stupid, and that’s what really makes them stupid.
When someone is too stupid, ignorance is replaced by arrogance. And then this person feels like the world is a bit threat to survival at an individual level. We call this attitude being egotistic. But you can’t stop being an egotistic when suppressing your emotions, or imagining that everyone is a source of negative energy but you. As a matter of fact, you commonly see the egotistic drop into apathy precisely because they confuse the work they must do on themselves with the anger they feel for the world as a whole.
Have you ever noticed how easily people turn to anger when you ask them a question? That’s a reaction of someone moving from apathy to fear. On the surface this person is acting like a rude individual, but the emotions behind this behavior are those one feels when watching a horror movie. They are afraid of their own feelings, and project this fear as an aggression.
Now comes the interesting part: Who are they attacking? They are attacking precisely the one that can help them, because only such individual will ask the right questions. An individual on apathy and lack of interest, can’t ask anything that is interesting or motivating.
So we come to an interesting paradox in society, that those who can uplift others, end up being perceived as a threat to them. And that’s the simplest way to explain insanity.
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Dan Desmarques
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Get over your aggression, as Trees are also part of nature, when you don't cut their branches, people start cutting the whole trees.
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Daniyal Umar
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I consider it an unacceptable fault to nourish the wrong attitude of angrily denigrating others, and I believe that it serves no purpose to speak about what one does not oneself find meaningful. And yet one only has to say something that diverges from the position of others, and the majority of people nowadays cling strongly and aggressively to their own side. They have no sense of impartiality. The readers of both the old and new traditions spend years squabbling over verbal formulations, squeezing every syllable of the words. Few are those who understand the profound key points correctly, whereas the ignorant majority think to themselves, “The teachings of Tsongkhapa and other great masters are being attacked even by this nonentity,” and they are full of indignation. For this reason, and because those who grasp the crucial points are few, I did not say much.
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Jamgon Mipham (The Wisdom Chapter: Jamgön Mipham's Commentary on the Ninth Chapter of The Way of the Bodhisattva)
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When admitting you are wrong, you gain back the control others took away from you when making you lose it. That's why you must say sorry. It represents a change of attitude but not really a change of personality; The changes on the personality come later on, when, by controlling yourself better, you don't express anger. Because saying sorry means nothing but anger means a lot. You should not want to be an angry person. When you get angry, those who make you angry, win; They win control over your emotional state, your thoughts, your words and your behaviors. They may then accuse you of always being angry and never apologizing, but that's not where you should focus your attention. The main point here, is that you’re living on the basis of instinctive reaction and not awareness or consciousness. So, when you say sorry, you are acknowledging that there is no excuse for losing control over yourself. You should not be sorry for being angry. That's an emotion; and you can't feel sorry for feeling. When you’re angry, you are feeling. When you insult, however, you are losing, yourself, your self-control, your self-respect, and even your capacity to use what you know. More knowledge, makes you more aware, more frustrated, having more and higher expectations on others, and more angry too, more often as well. But that's your problem! No other people's problem! They are just being themselves. Most people really think they are perfect as they are, and that the problems they experience are all outside themselves. And by realizing that, you say sorry as if saying sorry for not being who you really are. And when doing it, you get back the control another person took away from you. It is actually not good when someone needs to say sorry too often to someone else, especially if it’s always the same individual. But that someone else often likes it, as it makes them feel superior. That’s because their ego needs that. They have low self-esteem. Most people do! And that’s why most people's behavior is wired to their ego. Their likes and dislikes are connected to a sense of self-importance and a desperate need to feel important, which they project on their idols, the famous and most popular among them. They admire what they seek the most. When they think they are not important, they offend, to get aggression, which is a desperate need for attention; and to feel like victims of life, which is a deeper state of need, in this case, related to sympathy; and they then blame the other for what he does, for his reactions; and when that other says sorry, they think they have power over that insane cycle in which they now live, and in which they incorporate anyone else, and which they now perfectly master. Their pride is built on arrogance, an arrogance emerged out of ignorance, ignorance composed from delusional cycles within a big illusion; but an illusion that makes sense to them, as if they were succeeding at merging truth with lie, darkness with light. Because the arrogant, the abusive and the violent are desperate. God made them blind after witnessing their crimes against moral and ethics - His own laws. And they want to see again, and feel the same pleasure they once felt when witnessing the true colors of the world during childhood. The arrogant want to reaffirm their sanity by acting insanely because they know no other way. And when you say sorry, you are saying to them that you don't belong there, to their world, and that you are sorry for playing their games. That drama belongs to them only, and not you. And yet, people interpret the same paradox as they choose. That is their experience of truth and how they put sense on a life without any. And when so much nonsense becomes popular, we call it common sense. When common sense becomes a reality, we call it science. And when science is able to theorize common sense, we call it wisdom. Then, we wonder why the wisdom of those we name wise, does not help.
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Robin Sacredfire
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One consequence of this attitude was that the prophetic realists were much more aggressive. They took it as a matter of course that given the sinful nature of man, people could not be altered merely by education, consciousness raising, and expanded opportunity. It was wrong to put one’s faith in historical processes, human institutions, or human goodness.
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David Brooks (The Road to Character)
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Culture is a vehicle for true self-expression. The flowering of individual creativity takes place in the context of culture. When a child becomes peer-oriented, the transmission lines of civilization are downed. The new models to emulate are other children or peer groups or the latest pop icons. Appearance, attitudes, dress, and demeanor all adapt accordingly. Even children's language changes — more impoverished, less articulate about their observations and experience, less expressive of meaning and nuance.
Peer-oriented children are not devoid of culture, but the culture they are enrolled in is generated by their peer orientation. Although this culture is broadcast through media controlled by adults, it is the children and youth whose tastes and preferences it must satisfy. They, the young, wield the spending power that determines the profits of the culture industry — even if it is the parents’ incomes that are being disposed of in the process.
Advertisers know subtly well how to exploit the power of peer imitation as they make their pitch to ever-younger groups of customers via the mass electronic media. In this way, it is our youth who dictate hairstyles and fashion, youth to whom music must appeal, youth who primarily drive the box office. Youth determine the cultural icons of our age. The adults who cater to the expectations of peer-oriented youth may control the market and profit from it, but as agents of cultural transmission they are simply pandering to the debased cultural tastes of children disconnected from healthy adult contact.
Peer culture arises from children and evolves with them as they age. Peer orientation breeds aggression and an unhealthy, precocious sexuality. The result is the aggressively hostile and hypersexualized youth culture, propagated by the mass media, to which children are already exposed by early adolescence. Today's rock videos shock even adults who themselves grew up under the influence of the “sexual revolution.” As the onset of peer-orientation emerges earlier and earlier, so does the culture it creates. The butt-shaking and belly-button-baring Spice Girls pop phenomenon of the late 1990s, as of this writing a rapidly fading memory, seems in retrospect a nostalgically innocent cultural expression compared with the pornographically eroticized pop idols served up to today's preadolescents.
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Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
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My analysis reflects that "outstanding entrepreneurs" have in their personality attitude of responsibility, aggressive in experimentation (creativity and innovation), patience for results, friendly with uncertainty, calculated risk taking, Minimum personal needs, Manages social pressures well (Comparisons), adaptive (good team player and a leader). Can such a personality be built?
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Rakesh Seth
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In theory of the authoritarian personality, Adorno et al. (1950) argue that paternal punitiveness creates fear and aggressiveness that encourages individuals to seek certainty and environmental control. This motivation leads people to embrace authority, suppress societal difference, and generally endorse attitudes in line with conservatism.
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Bethany Albertson (Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World)
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The entire French approach was defensive and negative – and a negative mindset takes hold in many counter-productive ways. The huge cost of the Maginot Line and the appeasement and non-aggression line of the French Government and political left also played an enormous part in formulating policy, but this endemic defensive attitude – this rigidity to the methodical battle plan – had ensured that there could be no French march into Germany when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, nor again when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Had the French done so on either occasion, the Second World War would almost certainly have never taken place.
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James Holland (The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History; May-October 1940)
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At a purely descriptive level, this aspect of behavior must be considered when one attempts to deal with species differences. It seems first that the duration of the selectivity—the amount of time likely to be spent continuously in one kind of activity—may vary for higher and lower species. Periods of spontaneous play are shorter in the rat than in the dog, and still shorter than in man; the period of emotional disturbance following momentary stimulation seems progressively shorter as one goes down the phylogenetic scale; and so on. Secondly, the number and variety of the distinctive forms of behavior involved is greater in higher species—the number of recognizably different attitudes or interests, that is, is greater. And, finally, the variability of action that still remains selective is also greater in higher species: an aggressive attitude, for example, has a much more variable expression in the chimpanzee than in the dog.
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D.O. Hebb (The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory)
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A superior fighter pilot is made up of one part skill, one part attitude, one part aggression, and one part madness.
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Tom Clancy (Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign (Commanders))
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Who knew raccoons were so aggressive?
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Grace Hitchcock (Hearts of Gold Collection)
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Boundaries aren’t to push others away. They are to hold me together. Otherwise, I will downgrade my gentleness to hastily spoken words of anger and resentment. I will downgrade my progress with forgiveness to bitterness. I will downgrade my words of sincerity to frustrated words of anger, aggression, or rude remarks. I will downgrade my attitude for reconciliation to acts of retaliation . . . not because I’m not a good person but because I’m not a person keeping appropriate boundaries.
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Lysa TerKeurst (Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again)
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Aggressive Communication Style The first communication style we will explore is the Aggressive Communication Style. This communication style is borne out of a place of fear. This person fears they will not be heard or understood, and therefore, they enter into interaction or conversation with a loud volume and an attitude of entitlement. They approach the conversation with a wide stance and a confrontational posture. They feel the need to shout over others and force their point of view. This style of communication can often end up having the exact effect the communicator is trying to avoid, which is that people may not end up listening to the content of the sentences because they are distracted by the way that it has been conveyed. When people are faced with an aggressive communication style, they tend to become defensive and closed-off, unwilling to engage much further in the interaction.
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Richard Banks (The Keys to Being Brilliantly Confident and More Assertive: A Vital Guide to Enhancing Your Communication Skills, Getting Rid of Anxiety, and Building ... Skills for Lasting Relationships Book 2))
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This attitude will stand in marked contrast to the pervasive distrust and aggressiveness of our environment. When those around us see that we are trustworthy, that we are ready to be of service, that we do not harbour resentment, that we do not speak ill of anyone ... They should find that Christians are different because we follow Christ. We may have different opinions one from another, but we do not attack other people personally. When no one is excluded from our apostolate and assistance, then we are giving true testimony to Christ.
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Francisco Fernández-Carvajal (In Conversation with God – Volume 5 Part 1: Ordinary Time Weeks 24- 28)
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Faced with a problem, then, try to remain humble, while keeping a sincere attitude, and think about the right solution. No doubt some people will try to take advantage of your attitude. If your calm seems to encourage unfair aggression, be firm, but with compassion. If it turns out to be necessary for you to prove your point by severe countermeasures, do so without resentment or bad intentions.
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Dalai Lama XIV (My Spiritual Journey: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks)
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Average employee: Not too bright. Exceptionally well qualified: Made no major blunders yet. Character above reproach: Still one step ahead of the law. Zealous attitude: Opinionated. Quick-thinking: Offers plausible excuses. Careful thinker: Won’t make a decision. Takes pride in work: Conceited. Forceful: Argumentative. Aggressive: Obnoxious. A keen analyst: Thoroughly confused. Conscientious: Scared. Meticulous attention to detail: A nitpicker. Has leadership qualities: Is tall or has a loud voice. Strong principles: Stubborn Career-minded: Backstabber Coming along well: About to be let go. Independent worker: Nobody knows what he/she does. Forward-thinking: Procrastinator. Loyal: Can’t get a job anywhere else.
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Samuel A. Culbert (Get Rid of the Performance Review!: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing--and Focus on What Really Matters)
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you get such an indication from Jan that she’s going to try to derail you with a denial, or if she beats you to the punch and is able to voice the denial, there are several immediate actions you can take to quash her effort. First, if you want to get a person to stop talking, a very effective way to accomplish that is with one word: the person’s name. A fascinating nuance of human communication is that when we hear our name, we have a natural inclination to switch from speaking mode to listening mode, because it’s the way people typically get our attention to tell us something—we hear our name, and our ears perk up. The next step is to use a control phrase, like, “Jan, hold on a second,” or “Jan, give me a chance to make this clear.” That enables you to gain control of the exchange, and to ease back into your monologue. As always, it needs to be conveyed calmly, and without raising your voice—trying to control the situation by turning up your volume will create a confrontational atmosphere that will only make your job more difficult. Third, a remarkably effective mechanism to get someone to stop talking is the universal stop sign: You hold up your hand. You do it almost as a gesture of self-defense—you’re not extending it out aggressively and shoving it into the person’s face, or doing it with attitude. It’s a visual amplification of your control phrase, and it’s more powerful than you might imagine. The reason is that this is a verbal battle, and when you get the person to stop talking, you’ve taken away his weapon. In medieval times, it was a clash of swords;
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Philip Houston (Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All)
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r/K Selection Theory revolves around five issues of behavior, while political ideology revolves around the exact same five issues, arranged in the exact same way. These five issues - attitudes towards free competition/aggression, promiscuity/monogamy, high or low-investment child-rearing, age of exposure to sexual activity, and loyalty to in-group - are the intellectual bedrock of both.
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Anonymous Conservative (The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans)
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It is as if one of the grains of sand had stuck its neck out and begun to look around. We are that grain of sand, coming to the conclusion of our separateness. This is the “birth of ignorance” in its first stage, a kind of chemical reaction. Duality has begun. The second stage of ignorance-form is called “the ignorance born within.” Having noticed that one is separate, then there is the feeling that one has always been so. It is an awkwardness, the instinct toward self-consciousness. It is also one’s excuse for remaining separate, an individual grain of sand. It is an aggressive type of ignorance, though not exactly aggressive in the sense of anger; it has not developed as far as that. Rather it is aggression in the sense that one feels awkward, unbalanced, and so one tries to secure one’s ground, create a shelter for oneself. It is the attitude that one is a confused and separate individual, and that is all there is to it. One has identified oneself as separate from the basic landscape of space and openness. The third type of ignorance is “self-observing ignorance,” watching oneself. There is a sense of seeing oneself as an external object, which leads to the first notion of “other.” One is beginning to have a relationship with a so-called external world. This is why these three stages of ignorance constitute the skandha of form-ignorance; one is beginning to create the world of forms. When we speak of “ignorance” we do not mean stupidity at all. In a sense, ignorance is very intelligent, but it is a completely two-way intelligence. That is to say, one purely reacts to one’s projections rather than just seeing what is. There is no situation of “letting be” at all, because one is ignoring what one is all the time. That is the basic definition of ignorance.
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Chögyam Trungpa (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism)
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Saw-Scaled Viper Alternative Names: Echis, Carpet viper, Little Indian viper Where in the world? Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Indian subcontinent Habitat: Desert, fields, towns and cities Common prey: Lizards, frogs, scorpions, centipedes and large insects Size: 40 to 60 cm (15 to 23 inches) Lifespan: 25 to 30 years Conservation status: Not classified Description: The saw-scaled viper or carpet viper may be a small snake, only able to grow as long as 60 centimeters or a little less than two feet, but it is considered one of the deadliest snakes in the world. In fact, some scientists say that wherever this snake is found, it is responsible for about 80% of human deaths from snake bites. There are three main reasons why the saw-scaled viper is so deadly. Firstly it is the saw-scaled viper’s aggressive behavior. It has a nasty temper and is easily provoked. Secondly, it has a very quick strike, which when combined with a very defensive attitude, can be lethal to humans living nearby. The saw-scaled viper strikes so quickly that even the distinctive sawing sound it makes with its scales when agitated is not warning enough. Thirdly, the saw-scaled viper’s venom is highly toxic to humans, with the venom from the females being two times more toxic than the venom from the male snakes. Its venom destroys red blood cells and the walls of the arteries, so within 24 hours, the victim can die of heart failure. There is an anti-venom available, and as long as this is administered very shortly after the bite, the victim can be saved. Like other snakes, the saw-scaled viper’s diet consists of small animals like mice and lizards, as well as large insects. It hunts at night, hiding behind rocks and when it sees its prey, it coils and launches itself quickly and with accuracy, often biting its prey at the first attempt. The bite kills the prey within seconds, making it easy for the viper to drag it away or eat it on the spot. Visit IPFactly.com to see footage of the saw scaled viper in action (Be Aware: your method of reading this kindle book may not support video)
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I.C. Wildlife (25 Most Deadly Animals in the World! Animal Facts, Photos and Video Links. (25 Amazing Animals Series Book 7))
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To maintain, in this new situation, the old missionary attitude is not merely inexcusable but positively dangerous. In a world threatened with nuclear war, a world facing a global ecological crisis, a world more and more closely bound together in its cultural and economic life, the paramount need is for unity, and an aggressive claim on the part of one of the world’s religions to have the truth for all can only be regarded as treason against the human race.
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Lesslie Newbigin (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society)
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Aggression like this demanded slinging the first punch in a bar brawl, firing rounds at a range, or setting a car on fire.
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Katherine McIntyre (Poisoned Apple)
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Keeping a humble, joyous attitude about your training is the healthiest way to achieve long-term growth. Aggressive goal-setting can actually do more to hurt your practice than help it. Pursuing a goal too hard may cause you to make short-sighted decisions in the moment. This can lead to injuries or other setbacks.
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Al Kavadlo (Stretching Your Boundaries: Flexibility Training for Extreme Calisthenic Strength)
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If we have not bothered with our spiritual development, from time to time we will encounter particularly unpleasant experiences during our lives. Yet such experiences have their roots within our own attitudes and behavior. If we continually indulge in negative deeds and have allowed our minds to become dominated by aggression, greed, and stupidity, we are likely to encounter projections of this unwholesomeness. We may feel that the whole world is a hostile place and its inhabitants are our enemies trying to destroy us. Through meditation it is possible for us to analyze such unpleasant experiences, and identify the negative patterns of thought and behavior which give rise to theme. By identifying the underlying causes, we can then work on our inner selves and gradually rid ourselves of such negative traits.
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Stephen Hodge (The Illustrated Tibetan Book of the Dead: A New Reference Manual for the Soul)
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It is worth noting, though, that kids who have been spanked or slapped are bad at what psychologists call “moral internalization.” Rather than learning that “I shouldn’t hit my little sister because that’s the wrong thing to do,” kids learn that “I shouldn’t hit my little sister because Mom will slap me if I do.” This means that the child won’t hit his little sister when his mom is around, but what happens when she is out of the room or at work? Watch out—the kid who behaves only to avoid Mom’s wrath is now free to unload on his sister. Further, his mother has taught him that violence is a reasonable way to try to control someone else’s behavior, so why shouldn’t he use it himself? Studies have shown that kids are excellent imitators of the techniques other people use to get what they want, including aggression. In short, many parents who use corporal punishment focus too much on controlling their children’s behavior and too little on what they are doing to their kids’ narratives. Ultimately, we want our kids to internalize appropriate values and attitudes, rather than obeying in order to avoid being punished.10
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Timothy D. Wilson (Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change)
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I saw that he stayed on alert, looking out for a woman who was worth looking at. He didn’t intend to do harm with his habitual judgment. He didn’t recognize that his attitude was capable of inflicting harm. Yet he felt entitled to do as he did, and entitlement is aggression compressed like a barbed spring beneath an expectation. He taught me that women could never escape male notice and evaluation, not even married mothers on a Sunday morning, weeding their front yards.
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Charlotte Shane (An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work)
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The best defense in fighting is an aggressive defense. Each defensive move must be accompanied by a counter-punch or be followed immediately by a counterpunch. And you cannot counter properly if you do not know how to punch. That does not mean that "a strong offense is the best defense." That overworked quotation may apply to other activities; but it does not apply to fighting. It does not apply when you're pitted against an experienced opponent. You may have the best attack in the world; but if you're an open target-if you're a "clay pigeon"-you'll likely get licked by the first experienced scrapper you tackle. YOU MUST HAVE A GOOD DEFENSE TO BE A WELL-ROUNDED FIGHTER. AND THE BEST DEFENSE IS AN AGGRESSIVE DEFENSE.
Another reason for teaching punch first was this: You learned how to throw every important punch without having an opponent attempt to strike you.
I'm convinced that it's wrong to try to teach beginners punching moves and defensive moves at the same time.
Most humans cannot have two attitudes toward one subject at one time. And a beginner can't have two attitudes toward fighting.
If you take any ten beginners and attempt to teach them punching and defense simultaneously, more than half of them will concentrate on defense instead of punching.
That's a natural inclination, for it's only human that a fellow doesn't like to get hit in the face-or in the body either, for that matter. It follows that more than half the beginners will consider it more important to protect their own noses than to concentrate on learning how to belt the other guy in the nose. They'll develop "defense complexes" that will stick with them. Fellows with defense complexes rarely develop into good punchers. Even when they are shown how to hit correctly, they sprout bad punching habits while concentrating on blocking, parrying, back-pedaling and the like. They "pull" their punches; they side-step while trying to throw straight smashes; they move in with "clutching" fists that seek to encircle their opponents for clinches; and they do much showy but purposeless footwork. The little thought-ditch that is dug in the beginning will become the big channel for later fistic reactions.
You're lucky. You're starting with the mental accent on punch. And it's a 100-to-1 shot that your attitude will not change. It's true that you haven't punched yet at a live target-at another fellow. Don't worry; there's plenty of time for that. And when you do start tossing at a live target, you'll know exactly how to toss. That exact knowledge will help you to become accurate and precise, as well as explosive, against a moving target.
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Jack Dempsey (Toledo arts: championship fighting and agressive defence (Martial arts))
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Imperialist societies were governed by an essentially aggressive and militaristic attitude towards outside cultures, which they regarded as potential objects of conquest and economic gain. At their most extreme, they prohibited intermarriage with other cultures in order to preserve the “purity” of their own race.
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Christopher Kul-Want (Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides))
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took them everywhere, even to drive-in movies. While their favorite foods were marshmallows, Mountain Dew, and venison jerky, they were also big fans of live seafood. We used to fill a kiddie pool with a few inches of water and then populate it with crayfish and chubs that we netted from our lake. Watching the raccoons chase around their dinner in the water was better entertainment than anything you’d find on TV. But the problem with raccoon ownership is that the animals begin to go wild and crazy when they’re around seven months old. Critter got so territorial and aggressive that he’d attack you whenever you brought him a marshmallow. He somehow mistook the gesture of offering the treat as an attempt to steal it. He got to be so dangerous to be around that I had to drive him way back into the woods to release him into the wild. Some weeks later a buddy of mine pulled up in his truck and said he found my raccoon. When he opened the door, out rushed a raccoon that was certainly not Critter. The animal ran across the driveway, bit my dad on the leg, and then scurried up a tree. We then had to get a .22 and kill the raccoon in order to check it for rabies. Critter was never seen again, and we came to blame his maleness for his bad attitude. That’s why we got both a male and a female the second time
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Steven Rinella (Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter)
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Irrationality and aggressiveness in our time are, therefore, not emanations of some unalterable human instincts. Nor do they express simply the supposedly 'natural' rejection of reason. Irrationality and aggressiveness in our time reflect primarily the refusal to accept as sacrosanct the rationality of capitalism. They testify to the protest against the mutilation and degradation of reason for the sake of capitalist domination. This outcry against bourgeois rationality, as well
as its identification with reason as such is magnificently depicted~in Dostoevsky's Underground Man who 'vomits up reason' and who scornfuIly rejects the commandment to accept the proposition that two times two equals four. While this strikingly exemplifies the posture of irrationalism, an important aspect of the Underground Man's attitude should not be lost sight of. It is that the Underground Man, irrational and crazy as he is, is actually profoundly right in 'vomiting up reason' in refusing to bow to the logic of two times two equals four. For this logic is the logic of the capitalist market, of the exploitation of man by man, of privileges, insecurity, and war. To be sure, his contempt for this rationality, his uprising against the 'common sense' of human misery, is an irrational reaction to a pernicious social order. But it is the only reaction available to the isolated and helpless individual who, incapable of comprehending the forces by which he is being crushed, is unable to struggle effectively against them. This reaction is neurosis.
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Paul A. Baran (Marxism and Psychoanalysis)
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There is now also a substantial body of reliable information on Russian disinformation operations directed into Europe to alter attitudes to the conflict in Ukraine. Common themes identified by the special EU cell that is monitoring this disinformation activity include the allegation that Ukraine is to be invited to join the EU and NATO, that Ukraine was responsible for downing the Malaysian airliner MH17, that there are fascist roots to the government in Kiev, that COVID-19 was covert bio-warfare by the US against China, and that NATO is planning aggression against Russia.15 Germany has
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David Omand (How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence)
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Self-Confidence Formula First: I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my definite purpose, therefore I demand of myself persistent, aggressive and continuous action toward its attainment. Second: I realize that the dominating thoughts of my mind eventually reproduce themselves in outward, bodily action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality, therefore I will concentrate My mind for thirty minutes daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to be, by creating a mental picture of this person and then transforming that picture into reality through practical service. Third: I know that through the principle of Autosuggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means of realizing it, therefore I shall devote ten minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of the factors named in the sixteen lessons of this Reading Course on the Law of Success. Fourth: I have clearly mapped out and written down a description of my definite purpose in life, for the coming five years. I have set a price on my services for each of these five years; a price that I intend to earn and receive, through strict application of the principle of efficient, satisfactory service which I will render in advance. Fifth: I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless built upon truth and justice, therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects. I will succeed by attracting to me the forces I wish to use, and the co-operation of other people. I will induce others to serve me because I will first serve them. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness and cynicism by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in myself. I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory and repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my entire life so that I will become a successful and happy worker in my chosen field of endeavor. Signed ______
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Napoleon Hill (The Law of Success: In Sixteen Lessons)
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A covert narcissist can appear to be a loving partner for a long time. Their behavior often becomes more aggressive at the end of the relationship. This is when the narcissistic traits listed in the DSM-IV become more obvious; the sense of entitlement and superiority, the arrogant attitude, becomes more pronounced. They will still be covert with others, but the survivor will see and experience more of the overt traits coming to the surface. Their mask cracks when you, the survivor, begin trusting yourself. The stronger you become, the less they can control and manipulate you. When this happens, they no longer need you. You are no longer supplying them. This is when you feel their rage more than ever. This is when their behavior turns aggressive, cruel, and shocking.
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Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
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The Dark Cloud
Is the privileged attitude of those who were born with everything
Is the aggressive manner of people who want to rule as queen and king
Is the weakness in coping abilities that spoiled kids have
Is the obsession you have with finding your other halve
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Aida Mandic (The Dark Cloud)
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One does not have to believe in Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ to believe that man’s fall from grace came with city dwelling; it is common sense. Some cities might be prosperous and secure, with good land and a strong ruler; but they would be the exceptions. Most cities would be little more than large groups of human beings living together for convenience, like rats in a sewer.
The consequence is obvious. Man ceases to be an instinctive, simple creature. Whether he likes it or not, he has to become more calculating to survive. He also has to become, in a very special sense, more aggressive—not simply towards other men but towards the world. Before this time, there had only been small Neolithic communities, whose size was limited by their ability to produce food. If the population increased too fast, the weaker ones starved. It encouraged a passive, peaceful attitude towards life and nature. Big cities were more prosperous because men had pooled their resources, and because certain men could afford to become ‘specialists’—in metalwork, weaving, writing and so on. And there were many ways to keep yourself alive: labouring, trading or preying on other men. Unlike the Neolithic community, this was a world where enterprise counted for everything. It would be no exaggeration to say that the ‘rat race’ began in 4000 B.C.
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Colin Wilson (The Occult)
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Ricci's attitude toward Buddhism must be placed in its religious context-that of aggressive Counter-Reformation Catholicism engaged in a spiritual battle to win over Chinese society to Christianity. It is perhaps inappropriate to condemn him retrospectively for his lack of tolerance, when the very notion of tolerance would have seemed perfectly irrelevant to him. This virtue was associated with atheists like Voltaire and with whorehouses (maisons de tolérance), as in Claudel's witty remark: "Tolerance? Tolerance? There are houses for that" (Etiemble 1964, 50).
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Bernard Faure (Chan Insights and Oversights)
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Boundaries aren’t to push others away. They are to hold me together. Otherwise, I will downgrade my gentleness to hastily spoken words of anger and resentment. I will downgrade my progress with forgiveness to bitterness. I will downgrade my words of sincerity to frustrated words of anger, aggression, or rude remarks. I will downgrade my attitude for reconciliation to acts of retaliation . . . not because I’m not a good person but because I’m not a person keeping appropriate boundaries. And boundaries are 100 percent my choice, not theirs. Therefore, a much healthier place to exert my energy is with choices I can make to stay healthy while still staying available to offer as much compassion as my spiritual capacity will allow. And staying humble before the Lord, asking Him to grow me and mature me so my spiritual capacity will stay ever-increasing. So, how do we apply this practically? Remember,
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Lysa TerKeurst (Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again)
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I once debated a pro-gun friend about the benefits of better gun control. I did my homework. I found empirical evidence suggesting violence may be triggered by other acts of violence, but guns make the violence worse. I found Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage’s studies conducted over 50 years ago, which showed that the presence of a gun sitting on a table, relative to an object not associated with violence (like a badminton racquet), elicits stronger aggressive responses from participants. I found that more than 32,000 people die and over 67,000 people are injured by firearms each year in the United States. I found that firearm injuries result in over $48 billion in medical and work-loss costs annually. I believe attitudes about firearms should be scientifically driven and evidence-based, but none of these facts mattered to my pro-gun friend! Low-need-for-evidence individuals may portray themselves as concerned with or conveying evidence, but evidence is not actually important to them. Only high-need-for-evidence individuals care about evidence.
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John V. Petrocelli (The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit)
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Copy the following formula, sign it, and commit it to memory: I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my definite purpose, therefore I demand of myself persistent, aggressive, and continuous action toward its attainment. I realize that the dominating thoughts of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, bodily action and then gradually transform themselves into physical reality. Therefore, I will concentrate my mind for thirty minutes daily on the task of thinking of the person I intend to be, by creating a mental picture of this person and then transforming that picture into reality through my actions. I know that through the principle of autosuggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means of realizing it. Therefore, I shall devote ten minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of the factors named in the seventeen lessons of the Law of Success course. I have clearly mapped out, and written down, a description of my definite purpose in life for the next five years. I have set a price on my services for each of these five years, a price that I intend to earn and receive through strict application of the principle of efficient, satisfactory service, which I will render in advance. I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless it is built upon truth and justice. Therefore, I will engage in no transaction that does not benefit all whom it affects. I will succeed by attracting to me the forces I wish to use and the cooperation of other people. I will induce others to serve me because I will first serve them. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in myself. I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory, and repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my entire life so that I will become a successful and happy worker in my chosen field of endeavor. Signed………………………………
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Napoleon Hill (Selling You!)
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To return to the couple, let’s assume a disharmonious relationship in which one partner is excessively aggressive and the other excessively passive. This situation can have three possible outcomes. They sit down and talk it out, agreeing to a rearrangement of attitudes (i.e., they rebalance their relationship); or one day the passive partner gets fed up and waits for the other with an ax (i.e., a radical transformation of Yin into Yang occurs); or they separate, putting an end to the relationship.
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Ted Kaptchuk (The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine)
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Not only can there be no seduction, but there can be no rape either without a minimal signal. A being capable of truly extinguishing all signals and emitting no anticipated response would be protected even from violence. This is indeed the attitude we instinctively take when faced with physical aggression or aggressive demands – suppression of the signals of fear or desire.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
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The ecological crisis is only an externalization of an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man […] It is still our hope that as the crisis created by man's forgetfulness of who he really is grows and that as the idols of his own making crumble one by one before his eyes, he will begin a true reform of himself, which always means a spiritual rebirth and through his rebirth attain a new harmony with the world of nature around him. Otherwise, it is hopeless to expect to live in harmony with that grand theophany which is virgin nature, while remaining oblivious and indifferent to the Source of that theophany both beyond nature and at the centre of man's being […] Few are willing to look reality in the face and accept the fact that there is no peace possible in human society as long as the attitude toward nature and the whole natural environment is one based on aggression and war. Furthermore, perhaps not all realize that in order to gain this peace with nature there must be peace with the spiritual order. To be at peace with the Earth one must be at peace with Heaven.
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Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man)
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Handle it how?” asked a third mother. “Amazon Prime?” “We’ll handle it,” repeated Terry. “There are tarps in the toolshed. We’ll be fine.” JEN, IMPRESSED BY Terry’s masterful attitude, consented to hook up with him in the greenhouse that evening (we’d piled a nest of blankets in a corner). Jen was strong but had notoriously low standards, make-out-wise. Not to be outdone, the other two girls and I agreed to play Spin the Bottle with David and Low. Extreme version, oral potentially included. Juicy was fourteen, too immature for us and too much of a slob, and Rafe wasn’t bi. Shame, said Sukey. Rafe is hella good-looking. Then Dee said she wouldn’t play, so it was down to Sukey and me. Dee was afraid of Spin the Bottle, due to being—Sukey alleged—a quiet little mouse and most likely even a mouth virgin. Timid and shy, Dee was also passive-aggressive, neurotic, a germaphobe, and borderline paranoid. According to Sukey. “Suck it up, mousy,” said Sukey. “It’s a teachable moment.” “Why teachable?” asked Dee. Because, said Sukey, she, yours truly, was a master of the one-minute handjob. Dee could pick up some tips. The guys sat straighter when Sukey said that. Their interest became focused and laser-like. But Dee said no, she wasn’t that type. Plus, after this she needed a shower. Val also declined to participate. She left to go climbing in the dark. This was while the parents were playing Texas Hold ’Em and squabbling over alleged card counting—someone’s father had been kicked out of a casino in Las Vegas. The younger kids were fast asleep.
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Lydia Millet (A Children's Bible)
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Cognitive-behavioural therapists call the treatment of such people, generally characterized by the more feminine traits of agreeableness (politeness and compassion) and neuroticism (anxiety and emotional pain), “assertiveness training.”197 Insufficiently aggressive women—and men, although more rarely—do too much for others. They tend to treat those around them as if they were distressed children. They tend to be naïve. They assume that cooperation should be the basis of all social transactions, and they avoid conflict (which means they avoid confronting problems in their relationships as well as at work). They continually sacrifice for others. This may sound virtuous—and it is definitely an attitude that has certain social advantages—but it can and often does become counterproductively one-sided. Because too-agreeable people bend over backwards for other people, they do not stand up properly for themselves. Assuming that others think as they do, they expect—instead of ensuring—reciprocity for their thoughtful actions. When this does not happen, they don’t speak up. They do not or cannot straightforwardly demand recognition. The dark side of their characters emerges, because of their subjugation, and they become resentful.
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Jordan B. Peterson