A Quote by Gwyn Morgan
The best definition of the word culture (workplaces included) that I've heard is that it's how people behave when nobody is watching.
Related Quotes
It sounds, especially in this day and age, sort of snobbish, but we left school at 16, nobody went on to university unless you were a real brainbox. Instead, we went to Paris and Florence and learned about life and culture and how to behave with people, how to talk to people.
Imitation is very easy, and the whole culture and society depends on imitation. Everybody is telling you how to behave, and whatsoever they are teaching you is nothing but imitation. Religious people - the so-called religious people, the priests, the theologians - they are also teaching you, `Be like Jesus, be like Buddha, be like Krishna.` Nobody ever tells you, `Just be yourself` - nobody. Everybody is against you, it seems. Nobody allows you to be yourself, nobody gives you any freedom. You can be in this world, but you must imitate somebody.
I claim that space is part of our culture. You've heard complaints that nobody knows the names of the astronauts, that nobody gets excited about launches, that nobody cares anymore except people in the industry. I don't believe that for a minute.
People who describe culture and values and how people behave - I've heard people refer to it as 'the soft stuff'-they often underestimate its importance. The soft stuff actually is the hard stuff.
The definition of the word nerd has changed. It's now any attractive person with a hobby. The loneliness component is no longer included.
A definition is nothing else but an explication of the meaning of a word, by words whose meaning is already known. Hence it is evident that every word cannot be defined; for the definition must consist of words; and there could be no definition, if there were not words previously understood without definition.
You will never experience less reality than when you are watching a reality show. You're watching people who aren't actors, put into situations created by people who aren't writers and they're second guessing how they think you would like to see them behave if this were a real situation, which it's not. And you are passively observing this; watching an amateur production of nothing. It's like a photo of a drawing of a hologram.
What I mean by it, and roughly what most biologists who talk about culture mean by it, is either behavior itself, or information that leads to behavior. Information that is picked up through social learning - so, from being with, watching, being taught by others. It's a way that individuals behave or get information about how they will behave that comes directly from the behavior of others.
Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter.
That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile - that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself.
I'd heard about rehab, where you send people with drug problems, but I soon learned that there's no standard definition of it; instead it's a generic word for a wide variety of treatments, including some that are outrageous. Past-life therapy? Exorcism?
When you have children your own hypocrisy becomes more apparent because you're telling them how to behave, and you're not behaving like that yourself. So it obliges one to really go in and try to look at why there is a huge gulf between how one knows one wants to behave and how one actually does behave.
Go back and take a look at what some black writers were saying in the 1820s, the 1830s. They make mention of how some white people would tell their children, if you don't behave, we're going to put you in the n - - seat. If you don't behave, we are going to make you sit with the n - - s. That's why we know that, by then, the word had become a slur.
The question before us is, whether people of African ancestry compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.
Internal character: how you behave when no one is watching.
