Shocking Behaviour Quotes

If I don’t read at least one bad thing about myself every day I take a long look at my behaviour and try harder to be shocking.

When just a kid, moved back to Canada and looking for a taste of England, I’d picked up a book of my Gram’s, a dog-eared romance from the ’sixties about English hospital ‘sisters’ trying to get it on with the doctors, and thought it very shocking behaviour for nuns.

That as my sister-in-law at Colchester had said, beauty, wit, manners, sense, good humour, good behaviour, education, virtue, piety, or any other qualification, whether of body or mind, had no power to recommend; that money only made a woman agreeable; that men chose mistresses indeed by the gust of their affection, and it was requisite to a whore to be handsome, well-shaped, have a good mien and a graceful behaviour; but that for a wife, no deformity would shock the fancy, no ill qualities the judgment; the money was the thing; the portion was neither crooked nor monstrous, but the money was always agreeable, whatever the wife was.

The day I will stop being shocked by human behaviour, is the day I will know that the last bit of my heart purity is lost forever.

I know Scotty is a terrible person, so why am I so shocked? Why am I always shocked by people and their shitty behaviour?

Shocked, the teacher rushed out and brought back the headmistress. Throughout the rest of the period, both of them tried to figure out who set off the bomb and gave us lectures on our rowdy behaviour.

..."Were hostages ever killed?" She shook her head. "Not until the end. When everything...fell apart. All it needs,",she said, memories clouding her mind, "is the breaking of one rule, one law. A breaking that then no one calls to account. Once that happens, once the shock passes, every law shatters. Every rule of conduct, of proper behaviour, it all vanishes. Then the hounds inside each and everyone of us is unleashed. At that moment Withal" - she met his eyes, defiant against the grief she saw in them - "we show our true selves. We are not beasts- we are something far worse. There deep inside us. You see it - the emptiness in the eyes, as horror upon horror is committed, and no one feels. No one feels a thing.

All it needs,’ she said, memories clouding her mind, ‘is the breaking of one rule, one law. A breaking that no one then calls to account. Once that happens, once the shock passes, every law shatters. Every rule of conduct, of proper behaviour, it all vanishes. Then the hounds inside each and every one of us are unleashed.

Traces of historical associations can long outlast actual contact. In the dense, subtropical forests from India across to the South China Sea, venomous snakes are common, and there is always an advantage in pretending to be something dangerous. The slow loris, a weird, nocturnal primate, has a number of unusual features that, taken together, seem to be mimicking spectacled cobras. They move in a sinuous, serpentine way through the branches, always smooth and slow. When threatened, they raise their arms up behind their head, shiver and hiss, their wide, round eyes closely resembling the markings on the inside of the spectacled cobra’s hood. Even more remarkably, when in this position, the loris has access to glands in its armpit which, when combined with saliva, can produce a venom capable of causing anaphylactic shock in humans. In behaviour, colour and even bite, the primate has come to resemble the snake, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Today, the ranges of the loris and cobras do not overlap, but climate reconstructions reaching back tens of thousands of years suggest that once they would have been similar. It is possible that the loris is an outdated imitation artist, stuck in an evolutionary rut, compelled by instinct to act out an impression of something neither it nor its audience has ever seen.

The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behaviour at this time are those who think highly of Homo Sapiens as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the Totalitarian States, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of Capitalist Society, are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and they feel as if they and the world had gone mad together. Now for the Christian, this is not so. He is as deeply shocked and grieved as anybody else, but he is not astonished. He has never thought very highly of human nature left to itself. He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, ‘make people good by Act of Parliament’, just because laws are man-made and therefore partake of the imperfect and self-contradictory nature of man. Humanly speaking, it is not true at all that ‘truly to know the good is to do the good’; it is far truer to say with St. Paul that ‘the evil that I would not, that I do’; so that the mere increase of knowledge is of very little help in the struggle to outlaw evil. The delusion of the mechanical perfectibility of mankind through a combined process of scientific knowledge and unconscious evolution has been responsible for a great deal of heartbreak. It is, at bottom, far more pessimistic than Christian pessimism, because, if science and progress break down, there is nothing to fall back upon. Humanism is self-contained - it provides for man no resource outside himself.

Scientists tell us that rats, if deprived of toys and fellow rats, will give themselves painful electric shocks rather than endure prolonged boredom. Even this electric shock self-torture can provide some pleasure, it seems: the anticipation of torment is exciting in itself, and then there’s the thrill that accompanies risky behaviour. But more importantly, rats will do almost anything to create events for themselves in an otherwise eventless time-space. So will people: we not only like our plots, we need our plots, and to some extent we are our plots. A story-of-my-life without a story is not a life.

Now nice people really were. When would she leave off making mistakes about them? She hadn’t suspected this side of Mrs. Fisher, and she began to wonder whether those other sides of her with which alone she was acquainted had not perhaps after all been the effect of her own militant and irritating behaviour. Probably they were. How horrid, then, she must have been. She felt very penitent when she saw Mrs. Fisher beneath her eyes blossoming out into real amiability the moment some one came along who was charming to her, and she could have sunk into the ground with shame when Mrs. Fisher presently laughed, and she realized by the shock it gave her that the sound was entirely new. Not once before had she or any one else there heard Mrs. Fisher laugh. What an indictment of the lot of them! For they had all laughed, the others, some more and some less, at one time or another since their arrival, and only Mrs. Fisher had not. Clearly, since she could enjoy herself as she was now enjoying herself, she had not enjoyed herself before. Nobody had cared whether she did or not, except perhaps Lotty. Yes; Lotty had cared, and had wanted her to be happy; but Lotty seemed to produce a bad effect on Mrs. Fisher, while as for Rose herself she had never been with her for five minutes without wanting, really wanting, to provoke and oppose her. How

In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a second or two, sometimes less, and the whole dizzying sequence scarcely more than two minutes. And there were ludicrous imitations of the second and third order; for the people in the street, startled, outraged, bewildered by her imitations, took on these expressions in reaction to her; and those expressions, in turn, were re-reflected, re-directed, re-distorted, by the Touretter, causing a still greater degree of outrage and shock. This grotesque, involuntary resonance, or mutuality, by which everyone was drawn into an absurdly amplifying interaction, was the source of the disturbance I had seen from a distance. This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self, became nobody. This woman with a thousand faces, masks, personae- how must it be for her in this whirlwind of identities? The answer came soon- and not a second too late; for the build-up of pressures, both hers and others’, was fast approaching the point of explosion. Suddenly, desperately, the old woman turned aside, into an alley-way which led off the main street. And there, with all the appearances of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanours, the entire behavioural repertoires, of the past forty or fifty people she had passed. She delivered one vast, pantomimic egurgitation, in which the engorged identities of the last fifty people who had possessed her were spewed out. And if the taking-in had lasted two minutes, the throwing-out was a single exhalation- fifty people in ten seconds, a fifth of a second or less for the time-foreshortened repertoire of each person. I was later to spend hundreds of hours, talking to, observing, taping, learning from, Tourette patients. Yet nothing, I think, taught me as much, as swiftly, as penetratingly, as overwhelmingly as that phantasmagoric two minutes in a New York street.

The experience of stress has three components. The first is the event, physical or emotional, that the organism interprets as threatening. This is the stress stimulus, also called the stressor. The second element is the processing system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor. In the case of human beings, this processing system is the nervous system, in particular the brain. The final constituent is the stress response, which consists of the various physiological and behavioural adjustments made as a reaction to a perceived threat. We see immediately that the definition of a stressor depends on the processing system that assigns meaning to it. The shock of an earthquake is a direct threat to many organisms, though not to a bacterium. The loss of a job is more acutely stressful to a salaried employee whose family lives month to month than to an executive who receives a golden handshake. Equally important is the personality and current psychological state of the individual on whom the stressor is acting. The executive whose financial security is assured when he is terminated may still experience severe stress if his self-esteem and sense of purpose were completely bound up with his position in the company, compared with a colleague who finds greater value in family, social interests or spiritual pursuits. The loss of employment will be perceived as a major threat by the one, while the other may see it as an opportunity. There is no uniform and universal relationship between a stressor and the stress response. Each stress event is singular and is experienced in the present, but it also has its resonance from the past. The intensity of the stress experience and its long-term consequences depend on many factors unique to each individual. What defines stress for each of us is a matter of personal disposition and, even more, of personal history. Selye discovered that the biology of stress predominantly affected three types of tissues or organs in the body: in the hormonal system, visible changes occurred in the adrenal glands; in the immune system, stress affected the spleen, the thymus and the lymph glands; and the intestinal lining of the digestive system. Rats autopsied after stress had enlarged adrenals, shrunken lymph organs and ulcerated intestines.

But Willi had withdrawn himself. For one thing, he did not approve of such bohemianism as collective bedroom breakfasts. “If we were married,” he had complained, “it might be all right.” I laughed at him, and he said: “Yes. Laugh. But there’s sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.” He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. “What position?”—I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. “Yes, Anna, but things are different for men and for women. They always have been and they very likely always will be.” “Always have been?”—inviting him to remember his history. “For as long as it matters.” “Matters to you—not to me.” But we had had this quarrel before; we knew all the phrases either was likely to use—the weakness of women, the property sense of men, women in antiquity, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. We knew it was a clash of temperament so profound that no words could make any difference to either of us—the truth was that we shocked each other in our deepest feelings and instincts all the time. So

In August 1977 Canadians reacted with horror and revulsion when they learned that in the 1950s and early 1960s, one of the most eminent psychiatrists in the country had used his vulnerable patients as unwitting guinea pigs in brainwashing experiments funded by the CIA and the Canadian government. Behind the doors of the so-called sleep room on Wards 2 South, Dr. Ewen Cameron, the director of Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, exposed dozens of his own patients to barbaric treatments from which some never fully recovered. Operating under the belief that he could wipe brains clean of "bad behavior" and program in new behaviour, Cameron kept patients in a chemical sleep for weeks and months at a time exposing them to massive amounts of electro-shock and drugs such as LSD, and forced them to listen to tape-recorded messages repeated endlessly through headphones. Cameron was not alone in his desire to reprogram the human brain. The U.S. intelligence establishment found in him an eager collaborator, and funded his work substantially and covertly. Eventually, after years of stonewalling by the CIA, nine of the dozens of victims were at last given a chance to claim restitution for Cameron’s “treatments” by taking the powerful U.S. intelligence agency to court.

There are two parts to growing as a person—well, no, there aren’t, there’s more, but you can simplify it down—the first is pinpointing problematic areas, the toxic parts, as you said, and cutting them out. You are immensely good at this,” he said, and it sounded a quite genuine compliment, “but it is only one half of the equation. The other part, once you have hollowed out all the offensive parts, is to replace them with healthy, constructive parts. New behaviours; new patterns of thought. Something to nurture those empty spaces back to whole. Because otherwise those holes stay open, and they beg to be filled, and they will collapse on themselves and cause even bigger problems than the things that once lived inside of them. And you, Ronoah? You are singularly lacking in imagination in this respect. You take half the bricks out of a veritable castle of behavioural instinct and you expect it to hold—you never put new ones back in. And I shall tell you why. “There is a difference between action and character. One you change on purpose, but the other, it changes clandestine, without your noticing, until one day you have to run to catch up with where it’s got to. There is a difference between making a mistake, and being a mistake,” he said, tapping Ronoah’s shoulder with one, and then two fingers. “Your problem, Ronoah, quite possibly one of the only problems I can offer that you have not already thought of, is that you are constantly conflating the two. To the everyday eye, character is immovable, immutable—how do you solve a problem when the problem is you? You cannot improve a broken system when the only tool you have with which to do the fixing-up is the system itself. You need new parts, better data—and it just so happens you are discarding a rather sizeable portion of the available data on yourself while you’re at it, which makes your calculations even more erroneous. Because, and get ready for this, it might come as a bit of a shock—because you are not actually broken.

Some patients who are profoundly multiply disabled are incontinent, smear faeces, cut themselves, dribble, smell, spit, bite, eat mucous, pull their hair, poke their eyes and are hard to understand. Shock at feeling a primitive response of disgust can make the therapist unable to think properly. (...) Sexually abused children and adults who display eroticised behaviour in the therapy room—stripping, exposing themselves, masturbating—can also cause stress for the therapist, especially on the first such occasion.

(Query – Why do people with no children of their own seem to think the shocking behaviour of other people’s offspring a fit subject for mirth?)

Lily Samson, The Switch, Outtakes & Quotes, shameless manipulation of. A one minute reading test I am dog --Dog, Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans, 2007 Allergies disclaimer: One must stress that this book is not intended for the unwashed masses: I delayed showering after the last switch. I’ve created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment. Adam has a “Pavlovian” reaction to Elena’s BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash? He frowns, seeing that I’m silent and trembling. ‘My perfume was weak; hers much stronger.’ I say, my temper flaring. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual wasteman chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer’s Strawberry Pavlova will get him into the lady’s knickers. Nope, she’s allergic to stupid. A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash, but a moron makes her skin crawl. A female of the human species displayed an unconditioned response: shoved cream cake into the courting male’s face. Requested a substantial meal of Shchavel Borscht with hard boiled egg --Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian Cookbook for Love, Romance, and mating behaviours: Humans, 1904 Ding-dong! --Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Neutral Triggers & Conditioned Responses: Canines, 1907 It is I! I make the best Byzantine shchi to entice a female. --Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Dead Souls, Notebook (1841-1844), The Nose and other short stories Right! She turned her nose up at his advances: Idiot! I hate strawberries! --Seraphima Vasilievna Karchevskaya Pavlova, Mrs, My Husband and I – Memoirs The lady did not have a sweet tooth. Man didn’t do his research. This is a cleverly written book. So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy. Just saying! In the words of our hero: Bloody pricey...But God, it is a nice smell. Don’t you like it? And then he “squirts onto her wrist, playfully.” Shhhh.. Doctors Pavlov & Chekhov are not amused. Shall we shuffle the deck with these random quotes? One minute! Plenty of time is a full minute for a skilled bullshit dealer to shuffle themselves out of a gloomy Russian medical clerical predicament. Not tricky when Lily Samson gives treats: All around us are dog walkers, their expensive breeds racing about, barking and sniffing each other’s genitals. ..thinking it all through those awful dog ornaments she hated... feisty feminist...she simply hates them. Men are so stupid! And then.. She took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like a dog before realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman’s cunt. --Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Gratuitous use of one particular French vulgarism nested in the English language since the Norman conquest of 1066 is well demonstrated by this Milan Kundera translation. One has to wonder if the original 1984 edition contained the word “pizda”? It is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock. --Scholar Germaine Greer But of course a cunt, in French, as much as el coño in Spanish does not carry near enough as much uncouth weight as in English. The English language doesn’t exist. It’s just badly pronounced French. --Bernard Cerquiglini Quelle conne! Un con reste un con! --William Shakespeare, Last Words, Holy Trinity Church, Gropecunt Lane, Stratford upon Avon, April 23rd 1616

By way of preparing me for a visit to Paul Foot, Michael told me a story about the time Paul, then 14 and a public school boy, visited Jill and Michael at the Abbey Road home. He was shocked that Jill and Michael had no interest whatsoever in going to Princess Elizabeth’s coronation. Paul was to accompany Isaac Foot to the great event. Michael said, “We’re going back to bed.” Later they mocked Paul about his reaction. Michael wanted me to ask him if he had recovered from witnessing Michael and Jill’s disgraceful behaviour. Of course, Michael well knew that Paul would now scoff at his once reverential attitude toward the royals.

After Quibell and Green, the following decades saw the wide adoption of those evolutionary principles of intellectual development so alluringly described by the likes of Freud and Frazer. These held that the ‘primitive’ – that is, the non-Western mind which, they imagined, was expressed in Narmer’s Palette – was the opposite of the scientific mind and close to the world of ‘feeling’ and to mystical and childish thoughts, where savage passions lurk just beneath the surface. Once again, this was based on the assumption that the behaviour of ancient peoples was similar to that of nineteenth-century tribal communities which had been studied and evaluated by the founding fathers of anthropology – people who often shared the same attitude to their subjects as their colonial administrators and whose view of their subjects has now become a part of intellectual history. And yet the vision still prevails. Kings like Narmer are portrayed as living in a time when humans were ‘closer to nature’ than we are today, and Narmer, the first pharaoh, is presented as a primal hero whose killing gesture symbolized the struggle of humanity emerging from the chaos of the primitive world. Thus everything is explained; ancient people were automatons with no facility for thoughtfulness, and all you have to do for their explanation is to find the key with which to wind up their imaginary clockwork. As for the early kings, caught in imaginary wars and forever planning for a mumbo-jumbo afterlife, Narmer’s gesture is explained as a method of filling his contemporaries with shock and awe.

Furthermore, there is plenty of direct evidence that the horrors of human behaviour cannot be so easily attributed to history and society. This was discovered most painfully, perhaps, by the primatologist Jane Goodall, beginning in 1974, when she learned that her beloved chimpanzees were capable of murdering, and willing to murder, each other (to use the terminology appropriate to humans).85 Because of its shocking nature and great anthropological significance, she kept her observations secret for years, fearing that her contact with the animals had led them to manifest unnatural behaviour. Even after she published her account, many refused to believe it. It soon became obvious, however, that what she observed was by no means rare.

Why, the way we judge the behaviour of men against women in this town is genuinely shocking.

Hello everybody. I'd like to talk a bit about my book Deep Inside a Psychopath's Mind. Well, for those that would like to read the book and would like to know about the story and about what could be found In The Depths of Psychopathic characters, let me tell you that this book contains everything (Or almst everything) relating to gruesome behaviour! Any kind of tortures, from physical torture to psychological torture, I wrote about canibalism, bloody scenes, sex scenes, and in many chapters of the book there are all kinds of words (Vocabulary) related to gruesome procedures. With this, what I mean is that this book is intend for adults only, and better said, for persons that do not have any problem reading about matters related to adults Thus, if any of the potential readers have any religious, cultural or perhaps special phylosophycal believes, I sincerely won't recommend this book to you. I want to explain all the above as clearly as possible: When I thought about to write the book, I though I should go where perhaps other writers have not gone! And in order to achieve that particular task, I wrote everything as clearly as possible, not mincing any word, not concealing any act, and indeed, what I wrote is waht I heard many persons (Psychopaths saying about Psychopathic matters) The last thing: Although this book could be violent and also very scaring, and perhpas shocking, there is a reason for all that to happen! And only if you read the book untill the last page/line, would be able to understand the whole story, it means that if you stop in the middle of the book, you will never know why those crazy acts were taking place.

Oddly enough, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses was a big Depeche Mode fan and he invited them to join him at a heavy metal nightclub, the Cat House. However, when he went off to a friend’s Beverly Hills barbecue and allegedly shot a pig, Depeche Mode were sufficiently shocked to issue a statement: ‘... as strict vegetarians, the band were appalled by Rose’s behaviour and do not wish to associate themselves with anyone who goes around shooting pigs for fun.

Nowhere did bacchanal self-indulgence find greater and more deplorable scope than in the clubs. Roués came there to boast of their conquests, to waste their substance in riotous living, to drink to deepest excess. To be overcome in liquor called for no shocked comment.’8 The notion that clubs were synonymous with good behaviour would be a later, nineteenth-century development, when rules were drawn up in response to too many incidents in the ‘hell’ of Georgian clubs.

From the vantage point of creating something useful (to maintaining and developing civilization), beautiful or true, Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) artistic philosophy involved rejecting the idea that art should create beauty and a road to transcendence. His purpose was to challenge the accepted way of doing art and so challenge all that was established, including that which is useful. In so-doing, his art created a sense of shock, confusion, and meaninglessness and contributed to anarchy.34 The novels and stories of James Joyce (1882-1941) share much of this philosophy. The Dubliners, for example, horrified audiences with its detailed depictions of depraved behaviour and these actually occurring in real (named) streets and pubs. The stories take the reader into a world of nihilism and Finnegan’s Wake simply creates a sense of ‘profound’ confusion.35 As for Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), he shunned musical harmony and tradition in favour of a highly-structured but incomprehensible kind of music which most people find it actively-unpleasant to listen to . . . a world in which nothing makes sense, there is no meaning, there is negativity, there is the Void.

Her shock and dismay at his forward behaviour gave her an allure he found irresistibly attractive.

short, sharp shock leads to hours of productive behaviour.