Behaviour Attitude Quotes

If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviours and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve.

Act as if you don't know me, and i will make it seem as though you don't exist.

There is too much negativity in the world. Do your best to make sure you aren't contributing to it.

There's nothing worthless about being wordless, it will only save your mouth from talking gibberish.

The attitude you pose is greatly influenced by the links of friendships you bookmark. Good friends, good attitudes; best friends, best attitudes. Guess what for toxic friends...!

A word does not start as a word – it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictates the need for expression.

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.

A good character is not only about the good person people know you to be. Your ability to tell the truth about how bad you had been is also a good character.

It's easier to maintain a good character than to recover it when it's gone bad!

Just as it did in the nineteenth century, the notion that the victims were 'only prostitutes' seeks to perpetuate the belief that there are good women and bad women; madonnas and whores. It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behaviour and those that deviate from it are fit to be punished. Equally, it assists in reasserting the double standard , exonerating men from wrongs committed against such women. These attitudes may not feel as prevalent as they were in 1888, but they persist - not proffered in general conversation... but, rather integrated subtly into the fabric of our social norms.

But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.

Victimhood gives us great moral superiority and entitles us to unquestioning sympathy while exempting us from examining any single one of our actions. A victim is utterly devoid of responsibility or blame. This of course leaves us vulnerable as we will carry on engaging in precisely the behaviour which provoked an unacceptable response.

Capitalist ideology in general, Zizek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.

When people support you when you have done something wrong. It doesnt mean you are right, but it means those people are promoting their hate , bad behavior or living their bad lives through you.

You see, Islam is the only religion that gives both husband and wife a true understanding of what love is. The Western “love” concept, you take it apart, it really is lust. But love transcends just the physical. Love is disposition, behaviour, attitude, thoughts, likes, dislikes - these things make a beautiful woman, a beautiful wife. This is the beauty that never fades. You find in your Western civilisation that when a man’s wife’s physical beauty fails, she loses her attraction. But Islam teaches us to look into the woman, and teaches her to look into us.

Jedi act with confidence, move with confidence, and breathe with confidence. Jedi possess a confident calmness in their looks, attitude and behaviour.

POLISH your MIND to reflect the shimmering BEAUTY of your WORDS and ACTIONS.

If we all work together there is no telling how we can change the world through the impact of promoting positivity online.

Never crave to be known for someone you are not. Be who you are in the day and when the lights are off, remain true!

I am proud to be a female and I know that we are strong. I do not need women parading themselves around in vagina suits and screaming vulgar terms to represent me. Let's keep it classy ladies.

The behaviour and attitude of another person's towards you reflect their state of inner self and mindset.

You are responsible for everything you TWEET and RETWEET.

There's no difference between a madman and a professor...it should be clear to you in the way they dress, act and think.

Take care of your manners as seriously as your money.

Being sociable is both a learned behaviour and an attitude.

If a friend starts behaving silly because you bother him so much, don't worry, you're not the first person, he has got a sting in his stomach, an hunger that causes an epidemic hatred.

Thoughts create emotions, emotions create feelings and feelings create behaviour. So it’s very important that our thoughts are positive, to attract the right people, events and circumstances into our lives.

Let your personality be your profit and not your punishment.

Wisdom is not counted in grammers, niether in fluency, but vividly shown in mannerism.

Motive lies behind action. It is the root of behaviour and attitude, the fuel we need to progress from desire to achievement. In our humanity we are driven to survive, and to be loved makes the living worthwhile.

Be assertive, in speech and in conduct.

True maturity is in attitude and a true attitude is maturity.

To kill someone it's not necessary to have weapons, your words and attitude can do the same job.

Don't ever feel sad about who you are. Don't wish to be a daughter or son to a wealthy home, just because you think you're poor. Look! Everybody's poor, i discovered it when i realized that its not everything that President Barrack Obama has.

Colonialism and its attitudes die hard, like the attitudes of slavery, whose hangover still dominates behaviour in certain parts of the Western hemisphere. Before slavery was practised in the New World, there was no special denigration of Africans. Travellers to this continent described the inhabitants in their records with natural curiosity and examination to be expected of individuals coming from different environments. It was when slave trade and slavery began to develop ghastly proportions that made them the base of that capital accumulation which assisted the rise of Western industrialism, that a new attitude towards Africans emerged. 'Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the man of colour. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism, rather racism was the consequence of slavery.' With this racial twist was invented the myth of colour inferiority. This myth supported the the subsequent rape of our continent with its despoliation and continuing exploitation under the advanced forms of colonialism and imperialism.

Your Fight With Someone Over An Issue Doesn't Change That Person...It Only Gets You Burnt Out...People Change When They Make-up Their Minds To Change! Never Forget That...

Dismantle your friend to see how he behaves. If he smiles with a beautiful grin, then take him back, he's worthy to be called a friend.

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

This institutional racism, the report explained, is ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

There is ONE difference between a successful and unsuccessful people. There is ONE difference between happy and unhappy people. There is ONE difference between wise and unwise people. There is ONE difference between achievers and non-achievers. And that ONE difference is the BEHAVIOUR of an individual. It is neither your education nor your wealth or social status but your BEHAVIOUR that decides your happiness, success and wisdom. Mind your behaviour and it will take care of everything else.

It is our function to encourage the behaviour, the manners, the whole attitude of mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy democracy. You would almost wonder that even humans don’t see it themselves.

Take care of your words, and see how they’ll take care of you.

It's Not Every Issue That Deserves Attention... It's Not Every Speech That Deserves Recording... And Truly It's Not Every Elder that Deserves Respect!

When insecurity starts to rub off on you, you begin to lose a sense of belonging.

And don’t forget, if you are very intelligent but load yourself with bad characters, nobody will follow you.

When the leader goes wayward, the organization goes wayward.

It's almost impossible for a dishonest person to believe that anyone can be honest.

Don't react to any angry actions, words and behaviours. Keep your quiet spirit, peace and calmness.

The most essential requirement for leaders is neither age nor gender. It is neither certificates nor positions. It is the character that reveals trust and exemplary life.

Laziness has made our cities unclean. If we begin to work and act appropriately, we will clean our cities of any dirt.

Great stories changed our heart and penetrated our soul.

Our sacred character develops, when we connect to source of life, the Creator.

May the might power of the Holy Spirit renew our thoughts and attitudes.

Twitter is a vessel that we can use to share #positivity to others through our timeline one tweet at a time.

We must read, mediate and affirm the writings of Holy Scriptures, to partake in the divine nature and overcome the struggles of life.

To live without any regret is to act right.

irrespective of our behaviour and attitude, we always expect justice and compassion from others.

Arrogance is the inability of a person to understand and accept different perspectives

Laziness is a black hole in our mind where dreams sleep, ideas lose relevance, and plans collapse.

If stress can't give us anything, then why give stress our attention?

Hurting excellence is one way in which mediocrity gives itself the moments of pleasure.

People don't hate your limits, they hate your habits.

Innovation is the heart of humanity. We need new ideas and new creativities to help address contemporary issues.

When people defend masculinity as an inevitable part of our nature, its simply a way for men to avoid taking responsibility for their shitty behaviour, and allows them to inwardly justify a dangerous attitude on account of it being perceived as masculine.

Your words may be heard but your attitude will be felt. Your attitude reveals your character so never try to deceive anyone with mere words. Word/Talk is cheap but character is key. It costs nothing to be authentic. Learn to be a man or woman of substance!

Avoidance is connected with the fear of being damaged or destroyed by hostility. Compliance is concerned with the fear of love being withdrawn. Avoidance suggests doubt as to whether love has ever been proffered. Compliance implies recognition that love is available, but doubts whether it will last. These patterns of behaviour are most obviously manifested in the pathological types of personality which warrant the labels ‘schizoid’ or ‘depressive’, but can also be detected as underlying factors in the attitudes of ‘normal’ people toward others.

The biggest question for me was always this: how did this man get away with allegedly raping woman after woman for more than a decade, and why didn't the police catch him sooner? It's not that the police have a bad attitude toward crimes against foreign women-it's all women. They still don't seem to anticipate how stalking behaviour such as the kind demonstrated by Obara can lead to serious injury and even death. I think-and since I'm not writing for the newspaper, I can actually express my opinion here- that sexual assault against women was always a low-priority crime for the police.

Rogers believed that we have within ourselves enormous potential for self-understanding and for altering our self-concept and for our behaviour. He believed that this potential can be tapped if a climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided, which person-centred therapy aims to do

Covert narcissists change their attitude depending on who they want to project their image to. My father was at work all day and my mother was showing us what a good mother she was with food, but she easily changed her behaviour to target my father, not caring at all about the inconsistency in her behaviour.

Much ecocriticism has taken for granted that its task is to overcome anthropocentrism, just as feminism seeks to overcome androcentrism. The metaphysical argument for biocentrism is meant to sustain moral claims about the intrinsic value of the natural world, which will in turn affect our attitudes and behaviour towards nature.

Overthinking is an outcome of unfavourable past experiences. One starts imagining the worst.. and then it is equally true that one is not aware of this... That's the first step...To observe yourself.. Starting with just 05 minutes every day can get you to a place where it will be possible for controlling this programmed behaviour and rewrite a better one..

Love begins with an acceptance of the person as they are. That does not mean we accept bad behaviour or a lazy attitude towards life. Our primary focus is on loving the person, come what may. Part of love is helping them become the best they can be. We want the best for them, but our love is not dependent on it. Life, without any assistance from us, has its teaching methods.

BE A LEADER A leader’s job often includes changing your people’s attitudes and behaviour. Some suggestions to accomplish this: PRINCIPLE 1 Begin with praise and honest appreciation. PRINCIPLE 2 Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly. PRINCIPLE 3 Talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person. PRINCIPLE 4 Ask questions instead of giving direct orders. PRINCIPLE 5 Let the other person save face. PRINCIPLE 6 Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.’ PRINCIPLE 7 Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to. PRINCIPLE 8 Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct. PRINCIPLE 9 Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man.

Followers Everywhere To start with; Facebook : 10K followers !! Instagram : 710 followers !! Twitter : 20K followers !! Followers!! Followers!! And Followers!! Well, who are these followers? Just more than being a crowd of audience, who are they? Ever thought of? And for what purpose are they following you or someone else? Is it because you are a famous personality, a best friend, or you're someone who holds a high status in the society or just because you're simply rich enough to be followed ? Everyone live their life the way they want to. No one is bound to live under certain limitations or boundaries. Every individual have their own freedom in life. Each one of them is unique too. But what holds us different from others is the work we do for ourselves and for our society. Our behaviour, personality, nature, our attitude towards life and our talents hold us apart from others. Some people are really good and some are really worse than you ever thought of. What I'm trying to say is that some are 'legally' good and they may or may not hold a high position in the society and some are 'illegally' good and they may or may not hold a high position in the society. I just want to say that follow people for who they actually are, for the good work they do for themselves and for everyone. And respect them by being their true follower in a true sense. The person whom you follow doesn't need to be a rich or poor. A person should be rich by heart and poor by wealth! Even I'm not someone to be followed, yet I do have a few followers. It's not because I'm some great personality or a renowned writer, but might be because they like my work. And I feel happy for that. And I thank God for blessing me with this wonderful skill of writing. Even I follow many people including some really great personalities for their good work and for their kind way of serving the society and the poor. And I believe that, this is the true way to show respect for them.

How can I create a helping relationship? 1) Can I be in some way that will be perceived by the other as trustworthy, dependable or consistent in some deep sense? 2) Can I be expressive enough as a person, that what I am will be communicated unambiguously? 3) Can I let myself experience positive emotions towards this person-attitudes of warmth, caring, liking, interest and respect? 4) Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the other? Can I be a sturdy respecter of my own needs and feelings as well as his? 5) Am I secure enough within myself to permit him, him separateness? Can I give him freedom to be or do I feel he should follow my advice, remain somewhat dependent on me or become a mold of me? 6) Can I allow myself to enter fully into the world of his feelings, personal meanings and see things as he does? 7) Can I be accepting of each facet of this other person 8) Can I act with sufficient sensitivity in the relationship, that my behaviour won't be seen as a threat? 9) Can I free him from the threat of external evaluation? 10) Can I meet this individual as a person who is in the process of becoming, or will I be bound by his past and my past?

We often form an opinion, about an idea, or a set of facts based on how they make us feel. In doing this, we mistake our mere attitudes for knowledge about the way the world is. Watch yourself, as you react to the opinions of other people throughout the day, someone will say something, by the consequences of social policy, perhaps, and you'll find yourself liking it or not liking it. And on the basis of that mere sentiment, we are tempted to affirm or deny the claim and even construct an elaborate chain of reasoning to justify doing this. This pattern of behaviour is very likely making you unhappy, and less rational. Real reasoning proceeds on another plane entirely. It is not about liking or not liking the way that facts line up. Or the conclusions of certain arguments. Real reasoning is a method of staying in touch with what is, whether you like it or not.

One of the things I find strangest and hardest is that we were having such conversations. We should have been talking about discos and electronic mail and exams and bands. How could this have been happening to us? How could we have been huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn’t know if we were doing the right thing, ever. We didn’t know anything. We were just ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they’d pulled the roof off our lives. And after they’d pulled off the roof they’d come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we’d been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives any more. We were living in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren’t making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us. I didn’t know if we’d be left with nothing, or if we’d left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so that we weren’t able to recognise ourselves any more. We could end up as new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances to the people we once were.

I proposed the following as core behavioural markers of life history strategies: agreeableness, conscientiousness, and honesty-humility; impulsivity, present vs. future orientation, sensation seeking, and risk-taking; timing of sexual development (and maturation, especially in females); restricted vs. unrestricted sociosexuality; long-term mating orientation; stable vs. unstable romantic attachments; exploitative vs. cooperative attitudes; and sensitivity to sexual/moral disgust.

Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us. When we're in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find "like-minded" people. But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissent opinion, as a member of a group. It seems to me that this is something we have all experienced - something we take for granted, may never have thought about. But a great deal of experiment has gone on among psychologists and sociologists on this very theme. If I describe an experiment or two, then anyone listening who may be a sociologist or psychologist will groan, oh God not again - for they have heard of these classic experiments far too often. My guess is that the rest of the people will never have had these ideas presented to them. If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives. A typical test, or experiment, on this theme goes like this. A group of people are taken into the researcher's confidence. A minority of one or two are left in the dark. Some situation demanding measurement or assessment is chosen. For instance, comparing lengths of wood that differ only a little from each other, but enough to be perceptible, or shapes that are almost the same size. The majority in the group - according to instruction- will assert stubbornly that these two shapes or lengths are the same length, or size, while the solitary individual, or the couple, who have not been so instructed will assert that the pieces of wood or whatever are different. But the majority will continue to insist - speaking metaphorically - that black is white, and after a period of exasperation, irritation, even anger, certainly incomprehension, the minority will fall into line. Not always but nearly always. There are indeed glorious individualists who stubbornly insist on telling the truth as they see it, but most give in to the majority opinion, obey the atmosphere. When put as baldly, as unflatteringly, as this, reactions tend to be incredulous: "I certainly wouldn't give in, I speak my mind..." But would you? People who have experienced a lot of groups, who perhaps have observed their own behaviour, may agree that the hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one's group, a group of one's peers. Many agree that among our most shameful memories is this, how often we said black was white because other people were saying it. In other words, we know that this is true of human behaviour, but how do we know it? It is one thing to admit it in a vague uncomfortable sort of way (which probably includes the hope that one will never again be in such a testing situation) but quite another to make that cool step into a kind of objectivity, where one may say, "Right, if that's what human beings are like, myself included, then let's admit it, examine and organize our attitudes accordingly.

No one can control their results. We can, however, control our attitude. When we practise compassion, it is most effective when it is unconditional and free from seeking an outcome – compassion is a matter of choice rather than a self-seeking action. And so, if we assist another human being from a place of presence and compassion, we are not looking to find our happiness off the back of others’ suffering. Nor are we trying to control them. Compassion is a conscious choice rather than an emotional knee-jerk reaction.

The police are there to do the job, not to think about it,' was the line used by critics, the harshest of which were often other police. But police officers see and hear at first hand the things that ail a society, and along the way they gain trememdous insight into how to fix problems or processes, even if they can't change people's behaviours or attitudes. With the right systems and resources, their personal capacity for creating a safer society is far more powerful than the guns they carry. This would be the thinking driving my direction when I later came to Victoria to take charge of its police force.

While paying attention to the messages in its public spaces, Christianity also wisely recognizes the extent to which our concepts of good and bad are shaped by the people we spend time with. It knows that we are dangerously permeable with regard to our social circle, all too apt to internalize and mimic others’ attitudes and behaviour. Simultaneously, it accepts that the particular company we keep is largely a result of haphazard forces, a peculiar cast of characters drawn from our childhood, schooling, community and work. Among the few hundred people we regularly encounter, not very many are likely to be the sorts of exceptional individuals who exhaust our imagination with their good qualities, who strengthen our soul and whose voices we want consciously to adopt to bolster our best impulses.

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.

Psycho-compulsion is therefore not just about instilling people with a so-called correct employability mindset. It is a mechanism for penalising deviation from what it defines as the right set of attitudes and behaviours. ‘What psycho-compulsion therefore attempts to do is silence alternative discourses to the neoliberal myth that you are to blame for your unemployment,’ said Friedli. ‘At the same time, it undermines and erodes alternative frameworks around which people can come together in solidarity to act against the social causes of worklessness.’ In short, psycho-compulsion not only pathologises and punishes a claimant’s dissent, it depoliticises the causes of joblessness (which discourages collective action), and it does so by resuscitating Margaret Thatcher’s earlier myth that unemployment can be reduced to character deficiencies.

I have never ceased to be fascinated by feminine beauty. In a man, beauty, if it exists, is usually simple; a complete harmony of physical qualities and behaviour all acting together as a whole. The slightest flaw causes it to disappear. In women, beauty is more complex. Often, in my experience, the impression of beauty is created by a single aspect of a woman and from that aspect beauty appears to spread outward through every part of them, rendering them beautiful in their entirety. Sometimes such beauty comes from a smile. Sometimes from a lovely pair of eyes. Sometimes from an attitude, or a form of movement, or a sentiment of goodness or happiness which reveals itself in a single expression. Sometimes it is the curve of a body from which beauty spreads, sometimes a tone of skin, or a river of glossy hair that catches the light and seems to shine like silk. Yet were that aspect removed and not replaced by something else, so too would the beauty it had brought to light disappear. Less often, beauty comes from several sources in the same person, all working together to increase the impression of overall beauty. If one of these aspects were to disappear, unlike a man, the woman would remain beautiful, though changed.

Hobbes shows considerable ingenuity and determination in his attempt to carry out his theory of the Will rigorously to explain the whole and every aspect of human behaviour. It is certain that in the end he lands himself in sophistries. But at the time of Hobbes and Bramhall, and indeed ever since until recently, it was impossible that a controversy on this subject should keep to the point. For a philosopher like Hobbes has already a mixed attitude, partly philosophic and partly scientific; the philosophy being in decay and the science immature. Hobbes's philosophy is not so much a philosophy as it is an adumbration of the universe of material atoms regulated by laws of motion which formed the scientific view of the world from Newton to Einstein. Hence there is quite naturally no place in Hobbes's universe for the human will; what he failed to see is that there was no place in it for consciousness either, or for human beings. So his only philosophical theory is a theory of sense perception, and his psychology leaves no place in the world for his theory of government. His theory of government has no philosophic basis: it is merely a collection of discrete opinions, prejudices, and genuine reflections upon experience which are given a spurious unity by a shadowy metaphysic.

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.

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.

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall. Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls. The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.

The German word Bildung also exists in Scandinavian countries but it cannot be translated easily into English. It refers to the shaping of a human individual’s personality, behaviour and moral attitude through their upbringing, environment and education. Neither education nor formation suffice to cover the comprehensive and complex meaning of the word. Bildung is a much broader concept, encompassing knowledge, judgement, a broad cultural and political orientation, an understanding of science and technology, and a cultivation of the fine arts.

On 1 April 1996 there was another wonderful happening. My unit, Investigative Psychology, doubled its manpower, or should I say, woman power. We were now two. Elmarie Myburgh, a psychologist from the SAPS Institute for Behavioural Sciences where I had worked before, joined me. Elmarie had completed honours degrees in psychology and criminology. Her perfectionism compensated for my disorderliness. She started by organising the chaos in my office. Elmarie was 26 years old and had her head screwed firmly on her shoulders. She was strong-willed and eager to learn. I decided to take her with me on Ressler’s course in order to introduce her to the detectives. If they accepted her, she would be in. I could not afford to work with someone who did not get on with the detectives. Elmarie had grown up on a farm and had a no-nonsense attitude, although she could be quite moody if she wanted to be. I thought she would be able to handle the detectives and hoped they would be able to handle her.

Every child should also be taught to comply gracefully with the expectations of civil society. This does not mean crushed into mindless ideological conformity. It means instead that parents must reward those attitudes and actions that will bring their child success in the world outside the family, and use threat and punishment when necessary to eliminate behaviours that will lead to misery and failure. There’s a tight window of opportunity for this, as well, so getting it right quickly matters. If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this. This matters, because peers are the primary source of socialization after the age of four.

OUR STATE OF mind plays a major role in our day-to-day experiences as well as our physical and mental well-being. If a person has a calm and stable mind, this influences his or her attitude and behaviour in relation to others. In other words, if someone remains in a peaceful and tranquil state of mind, external surroundings can cause them only a limited disturbance.

If one overlooks de Valera’s behaviour over the Treaty and the civil war his sheer durability has to be acknowledged. His courage in controlling a nervous temperament and in fighting the blindness that affected him increasingly from the start of the Second World War, his successful struggle to maintain Irish neutrality, all speak of a man who contained within himself elements of greatness. In one area however, his attitude to Michael Collins, he consistently showed the small-mindedness of a guilty conscience.

was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith. If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him. By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple – and it was on this that his enemies concentrated.90 False teachers were normally banished to a remote district. But Jesus, by his behaviour at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment. Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, especially verses 8 to 12, appears to state that, in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death. In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offence of the ‘rebellious elder’, was considered essential to hold society together. Jesus was a learned man; that was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him ‘rabbi’. Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin – or whatever court it was – he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence. No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus’ doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture. But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code. In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence. To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion – Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough. So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome.91 The circumstances attending Jesus’ trial or trials appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels.92 But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular.

Friend! There’s a subtle feature of speculative behaviour which reflects the public attitude to money itself. When money is in its right place, fulfilling its proper function, men’s minds are fixed upon the goods and services which money can help them to exchange. In such an economic environment the producers of real wealth are seen to earn a fitting reward for their labours and expertise, and in fact productive and community endeavour are portrayed universally as almost the sole means whereby the individual can get himself a goodly share of the world’s riches. Let there just be a change in the emphasis however. Raise the interest rates. Exacerbate the debt structure. Turn money into a commodity which can be bought and sold at a profit. Then you create a breed of men who live by their dexterity at the exchanges. When these men are seen to prosper more considerably than the producers of goods and services, there is a desire amongst the ordinary plodding citizenry to command a share of the action, and to participate in what are seen as easily made profits. Many a fond illusion was wiped out in the collapse of Wall Street share values during the crash of 1929. Whole volumes have been written about its causes and repercussions, and about the sinister shift in real estate ownership which took place during the spate of liquidations and forced sales which followed. But we shall content ourselves meanwhile with the comment that it was just one of a chain of events that were set in motion way back in 1913 when the Federal Reserve Bank was formed to lend money to the Government.

For any lasting change to happen in the country, society has to change in terms of its behaviour, attitudes and values. It is easy, even fun, to blame politicians for every wrong in the nation. However, politicians only reflect what society thinks.

We must be very careful that we do not label persons with dementia by their Behaviours. Labels can often reflect attitudes and can shape how we respond to people. It is not unusual to hear a resident labeled as a “wanderer” or a “hitter”. Labels can make people assume the Behaviour reflects the person and fail to recognise that the person is experiencing pain, fear or some other emotional or physical problem that needs to be addressed. Labeling