Weird Behaviour Quotes

People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.

Once the label has been applied, even conventional behaviour and achievements are seen as weird, since they are not expected of a weird person.

All these people talk about [Vivian Maier's] hoarding, the pack-rat way she went through life. Watching, I couldn't help but feel their reactions were at least partly about money and social status; about who has the right to ownership and what happens when people exceed the number of possessions that their circumstance and standing would ordinarily allow. I don't know about you but if I was asked to put everything I own in a small room in someone else's house, I might well look like a hoarder. Although neither extreme poverty nor wealth makes one immune to craving an excess of possessions, it's worth asking of any behaviour presented as weird or freakish whether the boundary being transgressed is class, not sanity at all.

So, in my work, I also focus on celebrating introverts because no one wants to recognise their strengths. Or to admit that they're the most powerful people in terms of confidence or self-esteem. In fact, extroverts mislabel introverts as crazy, weird, quirky, dock, (all negative connotations). I don't know why or how it is weird to be mentally independent. Or to not succumb to peer pressure.

So, in my work, I also focus on celebrating introverts because no one wants to recognise their strengths. Or to admit that they're the most powerful people in terms of confidence or self-esteem. In fact, extroverts mislabel introverts as crazy, weird, quirky, dorky, (all negative connotations)

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.

Sometimes this whole world looks very strange to you, the things you do seem strange to you, the behaviour of people, the conversations you hear here and there, the clothes, the roads, the plants, the animals, literally everything seems so strange to you! And let me tell you something weirder, that's exactly the feeling you should feel about this world, everything is really weird! Don't feel that you are mad when everything seems weird to you, because when everything seems normal to you, that’s real madness!

Scientists will discover a weak correlation between A and B, assuming C under D conditions. The university PR office will then post something for immediate release: ‘Scientists Find Potential Link Between A and B (under certain conditions)’. News organisations will pick it up and publish, ‘A causes B, say scientists’, which will then be read by The Internets and turned into ‘A causes B - ALL THE TIME!’ Which will then be picked up by TV shows that run stories like ‘A ... A Killer Among Us??’ All of this eventually leads to your grandma getting all weird about A.

I’m always talking about the internet and what’s happening now, so cancel culture is something I’m interested in as a phenomenon, but I don’t want it to come across like I’m butt-hurt about it because, honestly, I don’t really care. Because what is cancelling? People start a social media account and once they get more than 300 followers they can’t see their audience as anything but an audience, something to be performed to — which is why you get the weird thing of your mate who works in a brewery talking on Facebook like he’s talking to a packed convention centre. When you’re performing to an audience, the only human inclination is to be the benevolent protagonist. You’d never assume the role of the antagonist — that’s why trolls exist with anonymity. People who actually put themselves out there, online, their role is to be the good guy. We’re not aware of the solipsism of this behaviour because we’re all doing it. So once a week, culture generates a baddie so all the good guys can go: ‘Look how good I am in opposition to how bad he is.’ And the reason we forget about whatever morally [dubious] thing that person has done a week later is because we don’t care. It’s all literally a performance. There’s a purposeful removal of context in order to seem virtuous that happens so constantly that people can’t even be arsed.

When it’s said that quantum mechanics is ‘weird’, or that nobody understands it, the image tends to invite the analogy of a peculiar person whose behaviour and motives defy obvious explanation. But this is too glib. It’s not so much understanding or even intuition that quantum mechanics defies, but our sense of logic itself. Sure, it’s hard to intuit what it means for objects to travel along two paths at once, or to have their properties partly situated some place other than the object itself, and so on. But these are just attempts to express in everyday words a state of affairs that defeats the capabilities of language. Our language is designed to reflect the logic we’re familiar with, but that logic won’t work for quantum mechanics.

[Q]uantum objects present us with a choice of languages, but it’s too easily forgotten that this is precisely what it is: a struggle to formulate the right words, not a description of the reality behind them. Quantum objects are not sometimes particles and sometimes waves, like a football fan changing her team allegiance according to last week’s results. Quantum objects are what they are, and we have no reason to suppose that ‘what they are’ changes in any meaningful way depending on how we try to look at them. Rather, all we can say is that what we measure sometimes looks like what we would expect to see if we were measuring discrete little ball-like entities, while in other experiments it looks like the behaviour expected of waves of the same kind as those of sound travelling in air, or that wrinkle and swell on the sea surface. So the phrase ‘wave–particle duality’ doesn’t really refer to quantum objects at all, but to the interpretation of experiments – which is to say, to our human-scale view of things.

For many decades quantum theory was regarded primarily as a mathematical description of phenomenal accuracy and reliability, capable of explaining the shapes and behaviours of molecules, the workings of electronic transistors, the colours of nature and the laws of optics, and a whole lot else. It would be routinely described as ‘the theory of the atomic world’: an account of what the world is like at the tiniest scales we can access with microscopes. Talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics was, on the other hand, a parlour game suitable only for grandees in the twilight of their career, or idle discussion over a beer. Or worse: only a few decades ago, professing a serious interest in the topic could be tantamount to career suicide for a young physicist. Only a handful of scientists and philosophers, idiosyncratically if not plain crankily, insisted on caring about the answer. Many researchers would shrug or roll their eyes when the ‘meaning’ of quantum mechanics came up; some still do. ‘Ah, nobody understands it anyway!

Computer simulation often works fine if we assume nothing more than Newton’s laws at the atomic scale, even though we know that really we should be using quantum, not classical, mechanics at that level. But sometimes approximating the behaviour of atoms as though they were classical billiard-ball particles isn’t sufficient. We really do need to take quantum behaviour into account to accurately model chemical reactions involved in industrial catalysis or drug action, say. We can do that by solving the Schrödinger equation for the particles, but only approximately: we need to make lots of simplifications if the maths is to be tractable. But what if we had a computer that itself works by the laws of quantum mechanics? Then the sort of behaviour you’re trying to simulate is built into the very way the machine operates: it is hardwired into the fabric. This was the point Feynman made in his article. But no such machines existed. At any rate they would, as he pointed out with wry understatement, be ‘machines of a different kind’ from any computer built so far. Feynman didn’t work out the full theory of what such a machine would look like or how it would work – but he insisted that ‘if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum-mechanical’.

Most human beings are irrational most of the time & hence they have weird perceptions of usefulness

Mathematics, contrary to how it may sometimes seem, is an endless adventure into the weirdest and wildest places ever countenanced by the human intellect. It lures us into thinking that it’s ordinary and banal, because its roots are in the familiar – in simple numbers and shapes. It began as the tool of the merchant, the farmer, the builder of temples and pyramids, the early watchers of the seasons and the skies. But it’s anything but ordinary. It permeates every aspect of the reality in which we’re embedded, forming an invisible infrastructure behind the behaviour of everything around us, from the smallest particle to the universe as a whole.

I know I like to play games and dance and do stupid shit, but I’m an adult. A killer. I hold onto the magic in the world because there’s so little of it that’s truly there. So I create it for myself instead. I run and play and skip and do whatever the fuck I like because I don’t have to do what society expects me to do. I’m free of those binds, unlike every other adult on this planet. I didn’t conform. I don’t school my features, or tuck my head down when someone looks at me weird. I don’t correct my behaviour, I don’t try to fit in. Because fitting in is so very fucking boring. It’s a cage that everyone walks so willingly into just so they don’t stand out. Teenagers put their dolls down, hide their favourite toys and cringe if their friends ever find them. But why do we have to put the dolls down, Hellfire? Why can’t I like glitter and fairies and jumping on trampolines just because society decided I’m not allowed to play anymore? It’s crab shit.

Palm gestured vaguely. ‘I’d say it was an infection. According to Fenwick, that’s what did for Genghis too. But the weird thing is that there’s something inside those whales that doesn’t belong there.’ He pointed to his temples and traced a circle with his finger. ‘Fenwick found a clot in their brain stems. And some kind of leakage between the brain and the skull.’ Anawak sat up. ‘A blood clot? In both whales?’ ‘Not a blood clot, although at first we thought it was. Fenwick and Oliviera were pretty keen on the idea that noise was behind the change in the whales’ behaviour. They weren’t going to mention it till they’d found some proof, but for a while Fenwick was convinced it had something to do with the effects of that sonar system—’ ‘Surtass LFA?’ ‘That’s it.’ ‘No way.

It all comes from fear, right?’ Belle says. ‘That’s the ultimate fear-driven behaviour. You and I have different opinions, and only one of us can be right, and when you think differently from me you scare the hell out of me, so I’m going to suppress and persecute the hell out of you until you shut up and stop threatening me with your weird, “other” beliefs.

What I understand this to mean is that adulthood is not a developmental stage but a social position, and as such cannot be attained or maintained without the support and acknowledgement of others. And what others are acknowledging is not the state of one’s innermost psychological, mental or spiritual development–whatever that may mean–but the observable adherence to certain norms, of speech, of behaviour, of appearance, and the successful performance of certain roles.

Some men give priority to their friends than to their children. It's weird.

Hate crime and violent crime is something reprehensible perpetrated by other people, a small deviant class, mainly men – this, at least, is the commonly held view. But Miles (2003) argues that we must reckon fully and realistically with our barbaric evolutionary heritage; and Buss (2006) uses case study research to suggest that fantasising harm and death to others is extremely common. Freud would have agreed with such assessments of human nature, acknowledging that unconsciously, ‘safely’ repressed, we sometimes harbour destructive and taboo-breaking wishes not only towards enemies but also towards loved-ones and ourselves. Today’s ascendant coalition of groups opposing racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-religious views, and championing equality and human rights, want to abolish not only outward physical violence and its verbal scaffolding but also vocal and mental hatred. This amounts to an unrealistic and dangerous totalitarian agenda for the fantasised good, the mechanism for which is suppression not understanding. That we all have a barbarous dark side that can be triggered in certain circumstances is a thesis denied or ignored by many but recognised by so-called misanthropes, anthropathologists and DRs. Ironically, opponents of the concept of (often dark) human nature unwittingly force a mental illness status upon those who notice weird and hateful thoughts in their own heads and conclude that they are uniquely perverse and unacceptable individuals. In other words, denial breeds another layer of depression in the same way that sin-focused puritanical religions have caused inauthentic behaviour and created neurotic minds.

That’s the ultimate fear-driven behaviour. You and I have different opinions, and only one of us can be right, and when you think differently from me you scare the hell out of me, so I’m going to suppress and persecute the hell out of you until you shut up and stop threatening me with your weird, “other” beliefs.

the code of behaviour our society sets out for girls and women is so much more detailed and complex than the code handed out to men

Introverts are not afraid to be 'weird' or 'odd-looking', to look different from the rest. They're not afraid to do their own thing, in their own pace. They don't succumb to peer/social pressure. Therefore, in my view, introverts are the strongest bunch of our society.

It’s weird how much just one sentence uttered to yourself about the thing that you are doing, as you are doing it, can noticeably alter your behaviour right there and then. Just start watching how your thoughts play out.

And of course, [Boris Johnson will] never get questioned like this over at the BBC while the political editor remains a fully paid-up member of the Boris Johnson Admiration Society. So how does he get away with it? Andrew points out that factory resets obviously weren't covered in the technology lessons that Boris Johnson received from Jennifer Arcuri. Again, it's a funny joke. It's a good line, but he was the Prime Minister, and everyone knew he was a liar. Is it all about that guy that rang in when Donald Trump was here. That I always remember saying ‘but you must know he's lying’. Donald Trump was giving a speech in London about the size of the crowds outside the building he was in. And we had a camera outside the building he was in. We were looking at no crowds. And that simple juxtaposition of rhetorical claim by a politician with observable reality was chilling. It was spine tingling. I can claim that there are huge crowds, huge crowds, the biggest crowds, the greatest crowds outside this building. And I said, ‘how does it work? How does that happen?’ And someone rang me and said, ‘I know he's a liar, but it really upsets people like you and Sadiq Khan.’ And at the time I laughed but maybe that's all there is. Maybe your life - and sorry this is going to sound quite rude - but maybe your life is so weird, and your personality is so twisted that you find the frustration of people who care about the truth the closest you ever get to feeling joy. Is that it? Nadine Dorries watches Boris Johnson lie and claims that he's the most trustworthy person on the planet. What is wrong with her? It's not really a question about what's wrong with him; what's wrong with her? Whatever transpires at this inquiry or whatever emerges during these hours of evidence, I can tell you this: there will be a significant number of people who think that Boris Johnson has done nothing wrong or that he is somehow the victim of another witch hunt. You remember? It was a witch hunt when he was caught banged to rights by a parliamentary committee containing a majority of conservatives after even Chris Bryant had stepped down to avoid any accusations or allegations - false allegations – really, of impartiality. And they still called it a witch hunt. It would have been a witch unless the committee consisted entirely of 14 Nadine Dorries clones. That's the only circumstances in which those people would have claimed that he could receive a fair trial. Where do you even begin today? Do you begin with the 5,000 WhatsApp messages that a man who was in charge of the nuclear code somehow doesn't understand and can't find? I don't know. So, what is your theory now because I don't think I've got one any more. I watch him now, and I feel something very new, very different to what I thought when he was in power because when he was in power there is an urgency to the situation. There is a desperate need to share with the population the awfulness that they apparently can't see. Just now that he's not in power any more, it's almost as if I've allowed the full horror of what he represents to bubble to the surface. It’s now that he can't actually break anything, it's a retrospective reflection upon the abject awfulness of him. I mean the unbelievable awfulness of this man, the things that he's done. You can begin with Brexit. The lies that he's told, the damage that he's done. The contempt in which he holds all the things we're raised to believe are important: rules, obligations, standards, behaviours, fidelity, honesty, kindness, friendship, loyalty, all of these things we teach our children matter. And Boris Johnson teaches us that you can become the most powerful person in the country by treating all of those things with absolute contempt.

Eyeing the birds that are now staring at him from their perch, Greg breathes deeply, unsure of what he should do. He's heard too many stories about the weird crow behaviour that's become synonymous with this town and he's witnessed some of their antics first hand.