Top 100 Dysfunctional Quotes
#2. kind of person who could achieve anything if only he wasn't dysfunctional enough not to.
Robert DeMott
#3. Oh good, they were yelling again. Dysfunctional didn't begin to cover it.
Bethany K. Lovell
#4. After living with their dysfunctional behavior for so many years, people become invested in defending their dysfunctions rather than changing them.
Marshall Goldsmith
#5. Collecting anything requires a singularity of focus, but 78 collecting demands an almost-inhuman level of concentration. There is a violence to the search, a dysfunctional aggression that vacillates between repellent and endearingly quirky. It's intimidating to outsiders, and it feeds on sacrifice.
Amanda Petrusich
#6. I grew up very poor in a fractured family that was dysfunctional on both sides, but I sort of put up these reflectors to most of the negative things that have occurred in my life. I don't carry around much baggage.
Keith Stanfield
#7. As you recognize that you already own the wholeness you seek, and no one outside you can give you more than you already are, dysfunctional situations will evaporate like bad dreams exposed to the morning sun.
Alan Cohen
#8. This imbalance causes resentments within the over-responsible and dependency with the irresponsible person and this dynamic becomes the destructive life-pattern not conducive to happy families.
David W. Earle
#9. Would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe
Eckhart Tolle
#10. Loss of social standing is an ever-present threat for individuals whose social acceptance is based on behavioral traits rather than unconditional human value.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry
#11. There are two things you can run and not hide from- God and a dysfunctional family".
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#12. I play a guy who believes he's a king. He's the most common man in the world; in fact his family, like his suits, are just make-up. It's about dysfunctional people and dysfunctional relationships.
James Caan
#13. I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?
Irvin D. Yalom
#14. I never dreamed I'd be a spokesman for anything. But Pac Bell just asked me. The money was OK; the scripts were fun because I had to do in 30 seconds what it takes a whole feature to do and because the dysfunctional family of agents, managers and lawyers who represent me said it was cool.
Chris Eigeman
#15. My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.
Robert C. Merton
#16. Though all the daughters eventually succeeded in escaping from their families, they felt, even at this time of the interview (while in their 20s and 30s) that they would never be safe with their fathers, and that they would have to defend themselves as long as their fathers lived.
Judith Lewis Herman
#17. A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she's tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.
Pat Conroy
#18. If you should choose to look at those files, you will have to live with the consequences of your choices while, at the same time, being mindful that these choices will not only effect you, but will also infect, sorry, I intended to say effect, our entire family.
Donna K. Childree
#19. Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
Dana Spiotta
#20. Yep, we both put the "fun" in dysfunctional when it came to romance.
Chanel Cleeton
#21. Dysfunctional muscles are generally not diseased, aging, or broken. They are starved of motion.
Pete Egoscue
#22. Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.
Niall Ferguson
#23. I can't love him. I don't. This feeling is not the selfish, grasping need that I've seen tear apart my family, writhing through heir hearts like worms through rotten apples.
Rosamund Hodge
#24. I think every family is dysfunctional, and some manage to control it better than others.
Viggo Mortensen
#25. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).
Peter Thiel
#26. The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.
Peter Thiel
#27. ...the state of perfection is an elusive goal; demanding something so obscure as almost unattainable and can become a compulsive, crazy making squirrel-on-a-wheel way of living.
David W. Earle
#28. Black and white thinking limits understanding and feedback, two necessary ingredients for successful resolution in creative conflict and successful understanding.
David W. Earle
#29. The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn't true.
Jeremy Grantham
#30. Scientific knowledge is advanced by the systematic criticism and purging of what currently passes for knowledge, so in religion too we need to criticize and expel all the illusory and dysfunctional religious material we have inherited.
Don Cupitt
#31. Neither my sisters, who were nowhere near, nor I knew depression; we knew bad mood. We didn't know drinking as disease, but as character flaw. Weakness. We didn't know "dysfunctional," but we lived it. We knew that if you were miserable, you brought it on yourself. She taught us.
Frances Mayes
#32. Character is destiny. For the cronic do-gooder, the happy-go-lucky sociopath, the dysfunctional family, under the gun everyone diverts to who they are. We may hunger to map out a new course, but for most of us, the lines have been drawn since we were 5.
Mary McCormack
#33. People who come from dysfunctional families are not destined for a dysfunctional life.
Bo Bennett
#34. I think we have an administration today that is dysfunctional. And if it can't get itself together to organize a serious program for finding nuclear material on its way to the United States, then it ought to be replaced by an administration that can.
Richard Perle
#35. Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.
Al Gore
#36. You see, I don't write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#37. Compassion is a beautiful grace that releases hate and fearful emotions. Through the power of compassion, when put in delicate circumstances with dysfunctional human beings, rather than loathing their behaviour, you can be compassionate to their internal suffering and love them unconditionally.
Christopher Dines
#38. Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.
Bell Hooks
#40. I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.
Mike White
#41. If they had a pill that would fix every dysfunctional family in the world, don't you think they'd be selling it?"
"I don't think the world is ready for that kind of happiness.
Michael Thomas Ford
#42. You cannot fix people who will not take feedback, because from their perspective, they do not have a problem.
Henry Cloud
#43. The more severe the dysfunction you experienced growing up, the more difficult boundaries are for you.
David W. Earle
#44. Seeing our VH-1 Behind the Music shows just how dysfunctional some of the moments of the band were but this new line-up has put the fun back in dysfunction.
James Young
#45. In my own life as a reader I experience real moments of alienation when a writer feels too perfect, or like even the flaws they are admitting are somehow noble, or dysfunctional in an overly edgy, aesthetically pleasing way.
Leslie Jamison
#46. Although an increasing number of humans are undergoing a process of awakening, identification with thinking is still the prevalent state of consciousness. Thinking is potentially a powerful tool, but it has taken us over, and a lot of it is dysfunctional and negative.
Eckhart Tolle
#47. I've learned that a family can have little glitches without being labeled dysfunctional.
Kathy Najimy
#48. That is such crap. How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.
Helen Fielding
#49. If you are looking for love under rocks or bringing home water moccasins, you might be confusing love and pain.
David W. Earle
#50. The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed.
Michael Lewis
#51. All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during our childhood, whether these messages are communicated verbally, physically, or silently.
Heyward Bruce Ewart III
#52. Honoring your word is the fiber from which trust is built.
David W. Earle
#53. People pay a dear price when not dealing with the powerful emotions.
David W. Earle
#54. Attitudes are enduring tendencies in your mind that show themselves in your behavior as well as your speech. Yoga encourages you to examine all your basic attitudes toward life to discover which ones are dysfunctional so that you can replace them with more appropriate ones.
Georg Feuerstein
#55. Of course, everybody's family is dysfunctional - we've accepted that. What are we supposed to do? Hate our parents for the rest of our lives?
Sandra Bernhard
#56. You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'
Damian Lewis
#57. What I think is that every family is happy in their own fashion, and every family is unhappy in their own fashion. Every family is both functional and dysfunctional.
Elin Hilderbrand
#58. It is a family; it's a slightly dysfunctional family, but it's also very close and warm and loving family.
Anna Wintour
#59. Arnold has succeeded at every level, and I believe he is the only person that can unite the people of this state and lead California from its current dysfunctional condition to the bright future that all residents long for.
Mary Bono
#60. One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanation we need to enclose it.
Charles Baxter
#61. Being judgmental is a form of attack keeping others off balance.
David W. Earle
#62. Mature adults gravitate toward new values and understandings, not just rehashing and blind acceptance of past patterns and previous learning. This is an ongoing process and maturity demands lifelong learners.
David W. Earle
#63. It's the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.
Pat Conroy
#64. Our current way of regulating the financial system is dysfunctional. Oversight is dispersed among numerous confusing bodies that at times have seemed to be racing each other to the bottom. Setting up One Big Regulator would end that problem.
Thomas Frank
#65. The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city school and broken black families.
Star Parker
#66. Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.
James Surowiecki
#67. I was wrong last night. Kyler isn't just trouble. He's an apocalypse-level disaster waiting to happen. I need to find some fallout shelter to hide in. And quick.
Siobhan Davis
#68. All too often, government's response to social breakdown has been a classic case of 'patching' - a case of handing money out, containing problems and limiting the damage but, in doing so, supporting - even reinforcing - dysfunctional behaviour.
Iain Duncan Smith
#69. If we want to improve, first we have to recognize our own maladaptive coping skills, called codependency, then change.
David W. Earle
#70. One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a "function.
Paul Beatty
#71. Live and learn not to take things so personal.
Toni Wallace
#72. Codependency is a learned set of behaviors, thought processes, and habits. When combined together, they fit a very loose definition. All people exhibit these traits to some degree, but some of us allow them to dictate our relationships with others and ourselves.
David W. Earle
#73. I want kids to have a chance to dream of becoming something like I did in my life, and when you're living in a home that's dysfunctional and unhealthy that way, you don't dream like that.
Picabo Street
#74. Is it best to be a dysfunctional human being or a human un-being ?
Benny Bellamacina
#75. My dark comic edge is the end result of trying to use humor to maintain my sanity growing up in a dysfunctional family in Honolulu.
Kirby Wright
#76. My brother and I had always been very close, especially living in such a dysfunctional family environment. My earliest memories were of my parents screaming and fighting, especially during the holidays. So, we'd weathered the storms together. In
Kristen Middleton
#78. It is one thing to know about your dysfunctional habits but quite another to change them.
David W. Earle
#79. As a parent who raised his children in dysfunction, I know the parental wounds my children received were not intentional; often they were my best expression of love, sometimes coming out sideways, not as I intended.
David W. Earle
#80. It's a very fascinating thing for an actor to play somebody who is suffering, and you have to express the suffering, but in an inarticulate way and sometimes a dysfunctional way, through violence.
Eddie Marsan
#81. What are humans meant to do; why are we here? Are we a mutation on the earth destroying its host? Are we a cancer destined to kill what supports us? I think not. So exploring this question is a powerful exercise in meaning; what is the meaning of human existence?
David W. Earle
#82. I quickly learned that you don't have to be incarcerated by suffering, and that, in spite of the dysfunctional nature of your family, you are an individual in full possession of your life.
Sufjan Stevens
#83. Any affair, by its very nature, is quite dysfunctional.
Rebekah Brooks
#84. People have to recognize that it's going to take some time for trust to be built, not only between Democrats and Republicans but between Congress and the White House, between the House and the Senate. You know, we've had a dysfunctional political system for a while now.
Barack Obama
#85. The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on
because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
Noam Chomsky
#86. Many people operate under the dysfunctional belief that they just need to find out what they are passionate about. Once they know their passion, everything else will somehow magically fall into place. We hate this idea for one very good reason: most people don't know their passion.
Bill Burnett
#87. Like the mind-set that places men above women, whites above blacks, and rich above poor, the mentality that places humans above nature is a dysfunctional delusion.
Petra Kelly
#88. Something that's unsustainable, like a dysfunctional relationship, can go on longer than you expect, and then end faster and messier than you think.
Peter R. Orszag
#90. My mom called Grandma today and told her we would no longer be attending family parties. My mom told her we have had enough of being blamed for something Brian did and everyone brushing it off like it was no big deal.
Erin Merryn
#91. When you journey inwardly exploring yourself, a sense of personal trust begins.
David W. Earle
#92. We fight a lot, you know, but that's family. We may be dysfunctional but we're still family.
Star Jones
#93. With therapeutic help, I was able to see the term dysfunctional as useful description and not as an absolute negative judgment.
Bell Hooks
#94. Families living in dysfunction seldom have healthy boundaries. Dysfunctional families have trouble knowing where they stop and others begin.
David W. Earle
#95. Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence.
Stefan Molyneux
#96. If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going, 'You know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty.
Jeff Foxworthy
#97. Men who hit do so because they can...someplace they enjoy or need to humiliate another. There is no love in violence, only control and domination.
Na'ama Yehuda
#98. Who was I to meddle in people's love lives? Mine was a mess. My heart
wanted the one thing it wasn't allowed to have - love with someone besides my
cupid-appointed soul mate. I was so screwed up, I made the dysfunctional
relationships on Jerry Springer look wholesome.
Jenn Windrow
#99. Putting labels on others creates a black hole of disregard where judgment thrives and schisms deepen.
David W. Earle
#100. Change is hard, difficult, painful, and often messy
David W. Earle
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