Conditioning Quotes

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”
― Jim Morrison

“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

“Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.”
― Jean Klein, I Am

“Since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“The reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“...wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior. For that there must be words, but words without reason... Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“It’s all about reprogramming our minds to focus more on what brings us joy.”
― Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life

“To us, the high-resounding “isms” to which our contemporaries ask; us to give our allegiance, now, in 1948, are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success; if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail.”
― Savitri Devi

“Harboring mockery, hate, and revenge is to burden too much your enemies' conditioning of your soul.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“I'm a good girl. I am pretty. I am always happy-go-lucky.”
― Louise O'Neill, Only Ever Yours

“Being human trespass the conditionings of the laws of the worlds that have been created by the conditioned society — these reflective of a conditioned mind reflect the facets of the self, to discipline and educate indirectly; restrict evolution for pardon, and affliction”
― AainaA-Ridtz A R, The Sacred Key — Transcending Humanity

“The goal is to face your fears. That is how you overcome fear. Then it can’t have a stronghold over you, your beliefs, and your mind.”
― Dana Arcuri, Intuitive Guide: How to Trust Your Gut, Embrace Divine Signs, & Connect with Heavenly Messengers

“He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." He underlined the words. "The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary." A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose–well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes–make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!”
― Aldous Huxley

“I think that many people think as they are conditioned to think.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Unless all human beings are ready to overcome their conditioning, we can never ever meet heart to heart and therefore never can have a true relationship based on pure Love.”
― Stelian Aconi, Unveiling our True Reality: with the Wisdom of the Awakened Masters

“Your real nature is to move at your own pace but your conscious mind and all its conditioning is constantly racing around like a monkey swinging from branch to branch looking for something it can never find.”
― Oli Anderson, Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace

“The real ‘You’ is like a lake as smooth as glass but the world has conditioned you to identify with the things that disturb your peace.”
― Oli Anderson, Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace

“Religious belief isn’t proof of truth, it’s proof of conditioning.”
― Chidi Ejeagba

“Children develop dysfunction when their development is disrupted.”
― Gunda Frey

“Pavlov was fascinated with “ideas of the opposite.” Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission…. But when, somehow—starve them, traumatize, shock, castrate them, send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves, past “equivalent” and “paradoxical” phases—you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave… who would be loved, but suffers his world’s indifference, and, “I think,” Pavlov writing to Janet, “it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients.” Our madmen, our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecile—”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Taste is not born on the tongue. It is shaped in memory, repetition, and meaning.”
― Joshua Steven Cooke, The Programmed Palate: How Taste, Memory, and Culture Shape What We Crave-and Why

“Shame evaporates the moment you realize there is logic to your pain. Your behavior is never random; it is a history trying to speak.”
― Ambidextrous Anmol

“Every life begins inside a story that someone else started.”
― PIERRE LAGRENAT

“The mirror does not lie. It has been taught to speak in the wrong language.”
― Nikita Datar, You Are the Love You Seek: 365 Days of Self-Love, Healing, and Becoming: A Daily Guide with Quotes, Lessons, and Transformative Practices for Personal Growth

“The work you do behind closed doors separates those who merely survive the four quarters from those who dictate them. Strength, speed, endurance — build all three, or the game will expose the one you skipped.”
― Elite Fitness Equipment

“From chariot horses in the ancient world, to Hannibal’s merciless exploitation of elephants to cross the Alps and confront the Roman Empire, animals have played a fundamental role in the long and murky history of human warfare. But it was not until the twentieth century that the military use of animals became distinctly sinister and bizarre. During the Second World War, the American army used kamikaze “tankdogs” to blow up German panzers. In their book A 'Higher Form of Killing', Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman describe how the dogs were taken away from their mothers as soon as they were weaned, and were only given food under the bellies of tanks. Once on the battlefield, the dogs were held on the verge of starvation, with explosives and a tall triggering antenna strapped to their backs. As the German panzers approached, the hungry animals were released. Running instinctively under the enemy tanks searching for food, the antenna would scrape along the metal belly, detonating the explosives and thus destroying both tank and dog.”
― William Johnson, The Rose-Tinted Menagerie