Antonio Damasio Quotes

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

From the days of Cain and Abel, we know all too well there will always be evil. But that evil shouldn't take away our freedoms.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

An animal takes freely anything that it wishes: it commits no sin and is not held responsible for its action because it knows no better. But as soon as the idea of 'mine' and 'thine' has been imprinted upon our consciousness, then also the responsibility comes.

Simply to pit "society" against "nature," "humanity" against the "biosphere," and "reason," "technology," and "science" against less developed, often primitive forms of human interaction with the natural world, prevents us from examining the highly complex differences and divisions within society so necessary to define our problems and their solutions.

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature ...

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

It is just man's turning away from instinct--his opposing himself to instinct--that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature andseeks to perpetuate nature; while consciousness can only seek culture or its denial.

The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.

Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with the liberty to choose.

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.