Human Instincts Quotes

There was an idea that God created man different from other animals, because man was rational and animals had drives and instincts. That idea of a rational man that was specially created went out the window when Darwin showed that we evolved from animal ancestors, that we have instincts, much as do animals, and that our instincts are very important. It was a much more sophisticated, nuanced, and rich view of the human mind.

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form- an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

There are 7 billion people on the planet. Pretty much everyone is doing sex. It's not like you need to order the "baby-starter kit" on Amazon. Instincts will come to you at the weirdest places and times.

At the root of the Noble Savage myth is this basic truth: the savage is good, but he's also violent. This is why Rousseau propounded the need for contracts between the savage and society. The savage also shows that in order to understand the need for civilization and culture, mankind needs to see barbarism. One could not exist without the other.

Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

One of the eternal rights is the individual’s right to live. The strongest of all instincts—self preservation—is an assertion of that right.

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation.

Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.

The attacks of September 11 - and subsequent acts of terror from London to Madrid to Fort Hood, Texas - embody the most repulsive of human instincts, the will to power at the price of the lives of others.

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

As we become more codependent with technology, it's not necessarily based on our desire for the technology but our desire for interconnectivity and wanting to stay connected, which is a natural human instinct. The technology itself is kind of emotionally manipulative.

Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.

To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.

Now it is human nature to want to eat to ones fill when hungry, to want to warm up when cold, to want to rest when tired. These all are a part of people's emotional nature.

Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.

The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.