Situational Quotes

“Christians know that joy is more than a feeling or an on-again, off-again sentiment that changes according to the circumstances they face. Followers of Jesus Christ distinguish between lasting joy and situational happiness. Fun and joy are not necessarily synonymous. We believe we can experience inner joy with no special external stimulus to make us happy.”

— George Foster

“Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs.”

— Irving Kirsch

“The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.”

— Philip G. Zimbardo

“We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil.”

— Philip G. Zimbardo

“Since the fall of Man and the return of Magery and our older ways, most disputes were settled in a civilized manner: sword to the face, mace to the neck, acceptable societal situational handlers”

— Adam P. Knave

“With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism.”

— Greg L. Bahnsen

“As managers rise up the hierarchy, a host of situational forces come to bear on them which can easily undermine their respect for the people on the front lines, and hence cause them to disregard the value in front-line ideas.”

— Dean M. Schroeder

“Some of us find our way with a single light to guide us; others lose themselves even when the star field is as sharp as a neon ceiling. Ethics may not be situational, but feelings are. We learn to adjust, and, over time, the stars we use to guide ourselves come to reside within rather than without.”

— Robert Crais

“How can HOW help us repair our faltering global economy?
Only by getting our "hows" right can we ensure that we are sustainable. This can only be achieved when we are rooted in, and inspired by, sustainable values. The global economic meltdown supplied a perfect, but painful, example of how sustainability cannot be guided by situational values. The economic crash occurred because too many financial companies became disconnected from fundamental values and long-term sustainable thinking. Instead of nurturing sustainable collaborations, banks, lenders, borrowers and shareholders pursued short-term relationships founded on situational values. More than ever we need to get out of this cycle of crises and build long-term success and deep human connections so that we achieve enduring significance in today's globally interconnected world.”

— Dov Seidman

“People view their own behaviors as originating from amendable, situational constraints,but they view other people's behavior as originating from inherent, immutable personality traits.”

— John Medina

“Thought you didn't believe in God," I said to Savannah as we moved slowly past the Coast Guard base at the end of the Charleston peninsula. "I don't," Savannah answered, "but I believe in Luke and he believes in God and I always believe in God when I truly need him." "Situational faith," I said.”

— Pat Conroy

“Training in high-stress situations increases what psychologists call "situational awareness." Defined as the ability to absorb information accurately, assess it calmly, and respond appropriately, situational awareness is essentially the ability to keep cool when all hell breaks loose. Because attention and pattern recognition are so heightened by flow, training in the state radically increases situational awareness.”

— Steven Kotler

“My friends and I often film videos when we get together and hang out, and they're usually just silly situational videos just for our own amusement.”

— Ed Oxenbould

“When you're doing hard work, getting rejected, failing, working it out-this is a dumb time to make a situational decision about whether it's time for a nap or a day off or a coffee break. Zig Ziglar taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don't allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, "hey, maybe I should check my e-mail for a while, or you know, I could use a nap." If you do that, the lizard brain will soon be trained to use that escape hatch again and again.”

— Seth Godin

“The difference between being a victim and a survivor is often a low level of situational awareness. You can't be a super-spy, watchful and paranoid every day. But I am more watchful than the average American.”

— Barry Eisler

“Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.”

— Ben Horowitz

“The presidential candidates are offering prescriptions for everything from Iraq to healthcare, but listen closely. Their fixes are situational and incremental. Meanwhile, the underlying structural problems in American politics and government are systemic and prevent us from solving our most intractable challenges.”

— Larry J. Sabato

“I like situational comedy when people are being completely serious and yet you can find something extremely funny, not jokes.”

— Bruce Robinson

“But by providing the background picture - the universal situational awareness that we desire - by showing the anomalies, the Space-Based Radar will change the nature of how we do our analysis and our intelligence.”

— Stephen Cambone

“Situational unawareness in the private marketplace or on the battlefield will cost you your livelihood or your life. In the Age of Obama, however, such willful ignorance is a job prerequisite. The less you know the better.”

— Michelle Malkin

“Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.”

— Chris Rock

“It is just good practice to do a situational scan and have situational awareness when you are out in the world.”

— Phillip C. McGraw

“Well, I think first of all there was a failure to have real, clear information at our disposal. There was a real lack of situational awareness. We didn't have the capabilities on the ground to give us real-time, accurate assessments of the physical condition of the city.”

— Michael Chertoff

“I'm a situational writer. You give me a situation, like a writer gets in a car crash, breaks his leg, is kidnapped by his number-one fan, and is kept in a cabin and forced to write a book
everything else springs from there. You really don't have to work once you've had the idea. All you have to do is kind of take dictation from something inside. (from Parade Magazine interview, 5/26/13)”

— Stephen King

“The concepts of right or wrong are always consequential. It can't be situational or it's not right or wrong.”

— Ilona Andrews

“The projects I have done on television, they're sitcoms, situational comedies. The problem is, maybe because they go on every day, Monday through Friday, one-hour format, maybe that's why they're labeled as a telenovela. But technically speaking, they're sitcoms because they're situational comedies.”

— Jaime Camil

“They thought they were employing an economy-saving doctrine of situational leniency, but they somehow failed to understand that by coming up with a calculus to determine who was big enough and important enough to command jurisprudential mercy, they were simultaneously making a calculation about who was small enough and unimportant enough not to qualify.”

— Matt Taibbi

“Technology has enabled government to have investigative and situational awareness on a scale and scope that were science fiction when the Stasi shut its doors.”

— Yochai Benkler

“There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.”

— Michael Hastings

“As a media artist and filmmaker, I'm constantly considering the role of situational context when creating my work.”

— Jason Silva

“The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism”

— Charles Eisenstein

“A nation," he heard himself say, "consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.”

— William Gibson

“The responses of friendliness, compassion, and appreciation that I felt ...
all situational permutations of basic goodwill
depended on my mind's being relaxed and alert enough to notice both what was happening around me and what was happening as my internal response. [p.50]”

— Sylvia Boorstein

“One reason for the decline in moral values is that the world has invented a new, constantly changing and undependable standard of moral conduct referred to as "situational ethics." Now, individuals define good and evil as being adjustable according to each situation; this is in direct contrast to the proclaimed God-given absolute standard: "Thou shalt not!"-as in "Thou shalt not steal".”

— David B. Haight

“First let's look at a model of Situational Leadership® II that shows a combination development level and leadership style.”

— Kenneth H. Blanchard

“What you have to do in certain situations, that's called situational hitting.”

— Joe Morgan

“I like books that are funny, but that aren't trying to be funny. I like situational humor.”

— Shiloh Fernandez

“All law is situational law. The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.”

— Carl Schmitt

“Change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation or self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won't work, because it doesn't 'take'.”

— William Bridges

“It isn't the changes that do you in, it's the transitions. Change is not the same as transition. Change is situational: the new site, the new boss, the new team roles, the new policy. Transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external, transition is internal”

— William Bridges

“You're trying to create a screenplay and your screenplay is there to give you a structure, rigidity, situational awareness, who the characters are, what do they want, what's the shape of the thing.”

— Paul Greengrass

“The "Lucifer Effect" describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It represents a transformation of human character that is significant in its consequences. Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in "total situations," where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play.”

— Philip Zimbardo

“Marriage and parenting are the two strongest vows anyone will ever make. When you see these commitments being carelessly discarded, you can be certain that the ethics of that generation have been abandoned. ... What our society needs is a good dose of biblical ethic from God's people - the kind of ethic that requires us to keep our word no matter what the costs. Situational ethics have so shaped our society that even God's people have lost the concept of absolutes when it comes to keeping our word.”

— Larry Burkett

“I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate.”

— Dan Flavin

“Love, safety, belongingness and respect from other people are almost panaceas for the situational disturbances and even for some of the mild character disturbances.”

— Abraham Maslow

“We try to find chemistry; we don't do a lot of situational baseball.”

— Dean Martin

“There is no moral absolute, and this leads us to situational ethics, which unfortunately is being taught in public schools all over America. This means that right and wrong is dependent upon the circumstances.”

— Ted Cruz

“Most of us fail to appreciate the extent to which our behavior is under situational control, because we prefer to believe that is all is internally generated. We wander around cloaked in an illusion of vulnerability, mis-armed with an arrogance of free will and rationality.”

— Philip Zimbardo

“If you know why someone is doing what they're doing, why they're behaving the way they are, then that's your job to reveal that, and often that's situational. The storytelling does that, and then some of it's your job as an actor to make that subtext come to life.”

— Cate Blanchett

“[Mead saw at least two major problems in dating. First, it encourages men and women to define heterosexual relationships as situational, rather than ongoing] You "have a date," you "go out with a date," you "groan because there isn't a decent date in town." A situation defined as containing a girl or boy of the right social background, the right degree of popularity, a little higher than your own”

— Margaret Mead