Top 90 Gavin de Becker Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life.”

— Gavin de Becker

52. “As the most powerful people in history, we have climbed to the top of the world food chain, so to speak. Facing not one single enemy or predator who poses to us any danger of consequence, we’ve found the only prey left: ourselves.”

— Gavin de Becker

53. “Men of all ages and in all parts of the world are more violent than women. For this reason, the language in this book is mostly gender-specific to men. When it comes to violence, women can proudly relinquish recognition in the language, because here at least, politically correct would be statistically incorrect.”

— Gavin de Becker

54. “We want to believe that human violence is somehow beyond our understanding, because as long as it remains a mystery, we have no duty to avoid it, explore it, or anticipate it. We need feel no responsibility for failing to read signals if there are none to read.”

— Gavin de Becker

55. “When people are telling the truth, they don’t feel doubted, so they don’t feel the need for additional support in the form of details. When people lie, however, even if what they say sounds credible to you, it doesn’t sound credible to them, so they keep talking.”

— Gavin de Becker

56. “Like the battered child, the battered woman gets a powerful feeling of overwhelming relief when an incident ends. She becomes addicted to that feeling. The abuser is the only person who can deliver moments of peace, by being his better self for a while. Thus, the abuser holds the key to the abused person’s feeling of well-being.”

— Gavin de Becker

57. “Why does America have thousands of suicide prevention centers and not one homicide prevention center?”

— Gavin de Becker

58. “If we are looking for some specific, expected danger, we are less likely to see the unexpected danger.”

— Gavin de Becker

59. “A Federal research project selected 1,600 children who had been abused or neglected and followed them for nearly twenty years.”

— Gavin de Becker

60. “If we are looking for some specific, expected danger, we are less likely to see the unexpected danger. I urge that she pay relaxed attention to her environment rather than paying rapt attention to her imagination.”

— Gavin de Becker

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

— Gavin de Becker

62. “The institutions of psychiatry, law enforcement, and goverment have proved that no matter what our resources, you cannot reliable control the conduct of CRAZY PEOPLE. It is not fair, but it is so.”

— Gavin de Becker

63. “Worry is a cloying way to have connection with others, the idea being that to worry about someone shows love. The other side of this is the belief that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about them. As many worried-about people will tell you, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.”

— Gavin de Becker

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

— Gavin de Becker

65. “As long as there are parents preparing children for little more than incarceration, we’ll have no trouble keeping our prisons full.”

— Gavin de Becker

66. “Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.”

— Gavin de Becker

67. “The abuser is the only person who can deliver moments of peace, by being his better self for a while. Thus, the abuser holds the key to the abused person’s feeling of well-being.”

— Gavin de Becker

68. “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.”

— Gavin de Becker

69. “Those men who are the most violent are not at all carried away by fury. In fact, their heart rates actually drop and they become physiologically calmer as they become more violent.”

— Gavin de Becker

70. “A woman is expected, first and foremost, to respond to every communication from a man.”

— Gavin de Becker

71. “The woman whose shoulders tense slightly, who looks intimidated and shyly says, “No, thanks, I think I’ve got it,” may be his victim. Conversely, the woman who turns toward him, raises her hands to the STOP position, and says directly, “I don’t want your help,” is less likely to be his victim. A.”

— Gavin de Becker

72. “Ordinary citizens can encounter violence at their jobs to the point that homicide is now the leading cause of death for women in the workplace.”

— Gavin de Becker

73. “Americans are experts at denial, a choir whose song could be titled, “Things Like That Don’t Happen in This Neighborhood.”

— Gavin de Becker

74. “Those who are good will qualify themselves.”

— Gavin de Becker

75. “Does he do all this with evil design? No, it is part of his concept of how to retain love.”

— Gavin de Becker

76. “When young, they are attached by heavy chains to large stakes driven deep into the ground. They pull and yank and strain and struggle, but the chain is too strong, the stake too rooted. One day they give up, having learned that they cannot pull free, and from that day forward they can be “chained” with a slender rope. When this enormous animal feels any resistance, though it has the strength to pull the whole circus tent over, it stops trying. Because it believes it cannot, it cannot.”

— Gavin de Becker

77. “Anxiety, unlike real fear, is always caused by uncertainty.”

— Gavin de Becker

78. “Their lives are literally on the line in ways men just don’t experience.”

— Gavin de Becker

79. “The conscious or unconscious decision to use violence, or to do most anything, involves many mental and emotional processes, but they usually boil down to how a person perceives four fairly simple issues: justification, alternatives, consequences, and ability.”

— Gavin de Becker

80. “My childhood wasn’t a movie, of course, though it did have chase sequences, fight scenes, shoot-outs, skyjacking, life and death suspense, and suicide. The plot didn’t make much sense to me as a boy, but it does now. It turns out I was attending an academy of sorts, and though hopefully on different subjects, so were you. No matter what your major, you too have been studying people for a long time, carefully developing theories and strategies to predict what they might do.”

— Gavin de Becker

81. “Difficult childhoods excuse nothing, but they explain many things – just as your childhood does. Thinking about that introspectively is the best way to sharpen your ability to predict what others will do. Ask and answer why you do what you do.”

— Gavin de Becker

82. “You cannot turn a decent man into a violent one by being momentarily rude, but you can present yourself as an ideal target by appearing too timid.”

— Gavin de Becker

83. “Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely in small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some level, and it causes a constant low-grade anxiety.”

— Gavin de Becker

84. “In the original form of the word, to worry someone else was to harass, strangle, or choke them. Likewise, to worry oneself is a form of self-harassment. To give it less of a role in our lives, we must understand what it really it is.”

— Gavin de Becker

85. “In his reply, Freud agreed “unreservedly,” adding that human instincts could be divided into two categories: “those which seek to preserve and unite, and those which seek to destroy and kill.” He wrote that the phenomenon of life evolves from their “acting together and against each other.”

— Gavin de Becker

86. “One way to charm is with the smile, which Eckman calls the most important signal of intent. He adds that it is also “the typical disguise used to mask the emotions.”

— Gavin de Becker

87. “Albert Einstein said that when you follow intuition, “The solutions come to you, and you don’t know how or why.”

— Gavin de Becker

88. “One of our closest relatives in nature, the Bonobo ape, long ago learned what these programs prove: that female alliances are the key to safety. When a female Bonobo is bullied by a male, other females will chase him off.”

— Gavin de Becker

89. “I’ve heard many times that people would make a comment, ‘This looks like a bomb,’ and still open it. That’s one for the psychologists to answer.”

— Gavin de Becker

90. “Many believe the process of creativity is one of assembling thoughts and concepts, but highly creative people will tell you that the idea, the song, the image, was in them, and their task was to get it out, a process of discovery, not design. This.”

— Gavin de Becker