Sunday, Aug. 31, 2003 | 2:51 a.m.

Interesting Quotes From Alisha's Psychology Textbook

"Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?" -National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, 1992

"Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards." -Soren Kierkegaard

"Truth is arrived at by the painstaking process of eliminationg the untrue. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true." -Sherlock Holmes

"It's not that gay men are oversexed; they are simply men whose male desires bounce off other male desires rather than off female desires." -Steven Pinker

"'Well my dear,' said Miss Marple, 'human nature is very much the same everywhere, and of course, one has opportunitities of observing it at closer quarters in a village.'" -Agatha Cristie, The Tuesday Club Murders

"There are three things extremely hard, Steel, a Diarmond, and to know one's self." -Benjamin Franklin

"It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind free from bias." -Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

"Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." -Mathew 6:3

"I contend that nature has give males the heaviest burden of all: the burden of always having to Make the First Move, and thereby risk getting Shot Down. I don't know WHY males get stuck with this burden, but it's true throughout the animal kingdom...It's always the male bird who does the courting dance, making a total moron of himself, while the femlae bird just stands there, looking aloof, thinking about what she's going to tell her girlfriends. ('And then he hopped around on one foot! Like I'm supposed to be impressed by THAT!')." -Dave Berry, Miami Herald

"To reveal and identify that which unites us rather than that which divides us [is] the principal challenge of the coming century and the coming millennium" -Vaclev Havel, The Art of the Impossible

"If you want to blame your parents for your own adult problems, you are entitled to blame the genes they gave you, but you are not entitled--by any facts I know--to blame the way they treated you...We are not prisoners of our past." -Martian Sellgman, What You Can Change and What You Can't

Psychology - Sixth Edition - David G. Myers - Page 107, Chapter Three: The Nature and Nurture of Behavior
Cross-cultural communication can also suffer in translation, as in there signs for English-speaking tourists (Lederer, 1987; Triandis, 1994):

• In a Greek tailor shop: "Because of a big rush, we will execute customers in strict rotation."
• An Italian laundry: "Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time."
• A Danish airline: "We takes your bags and send them in all directions."
• A Moscow hotel room: "If this is your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it."
• A detour sign in Japan: "Stop: Drive Sideways."

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science." -Albert Einstein, The World as I See It

"Nature is all that a man brings with him into the world; nurture is every influence that affects him after his birth." -Francis Galton, English Men of Science

There will be more to come. I've only made it to Chapter Four, The Developing Person. Since this textbook is pretty thick, this list will be extended as time goes by.

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