Leon Kass Quotes

Human beings are social animals; we devote a significant portion of our brain just to dealing with interactions with other humans.

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

If you want to design a successful human society you need to know what kind of animal we are. Are we a social animal or a selfish animal? Do we respond better when we're solitary or living in a group?

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Humans are humans because we are able to communicate with each other and to organize to do things together that we can't do individually.

Man has been adjudged a social animal.

Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed, or quarreled in troops and companies.

All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities.

Man is a social animal.

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

We're not just social animals in the conventional way that people think. It's not just a bunch of us who hang out together. We have a very specific pattern of ties, and they have a particular shape and structure that is encoded in our genes. It means that human beings have evolved to live their lives embedded in social networks.

You couldn't have human society without language.

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

Men tend to be hierarchical, but women are driven to make lateral connections so they can cooperate.

We're social animals. We've got to get along together. It's in our nature. We're hardwired that way.

In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants.

Lions, wolves, and vultures don't live together in herds, droves or flocks. Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his neighbor, and yet we herd together.

How like us is that filthy beast the ape.

The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself.

Our species likes being social.

Before language, cavemen simply grunted, and then they used the club. Communication changed that. It's the mechanism that created civilization and prevents its own destruction.