Gavin de Becker Quotes

I have had a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Intuition is always right in at least two important ways; It is always in response to something. It always has your best interest at heart.

I encourage people to remember that “no” is a complete sentence.

At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.

Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth of intervention.

It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different--men and women live in different worlds.

“No” is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you.

Denial is a save now, pay later scheme.

Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait.

There’s a lesson in real-life stalking cases that young women can benefit from learning: persistence only proves persistence—it does not prove love. The fact that a romantic pursuer is relentless doesn’t mean you are special—it means he is troubled.

Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then say that it isn’t so.

If you tell someone ten times that you don’t want to talk to him, you are talking to them—nine more times than you wanted to.

I’ve successfully lobbied and testified for stalking laws in several states, but I would trade them all for a high school class that would teach young men how to hear “no,” and teach young women that it’s all right to explicitly reject.

Every human behavior can be explained by what precedes it, but that does not excuse it.

You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guide you through risky situations.

The solution to violence in America is the acceptance of reality.

The unsolicited promise is one of the most reliable signals because it is nearly always of questionable motive.

People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.

We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness.

Threats betray the speaker by proving that he has failed to influence events in any other way. Most often they represent desperation, not intention.

We want recognition, not accomplishment.

I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

A person (or an animal) who feels there are no alternatives will fight even when violence isn’t justified, even when the consequences are perceived as unfavorable, and even when the ability to prevail is low.

Those who are good will qualify themselves.