Innate Behavior Quotes

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

Against human nature one cannot legislate.

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.

Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.

We are not by nature cruel.

Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man?

Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back.

The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.

No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.

Expectation loiters in the DNA of every sentient being; when you tell yourself or a loved one, 'Don't get your hopes up,' you're fighting ancient genetic programming.

No matter how civilized we are and how much society has curbed violent behavior. Human beings still have the same genes they had 10,000 years ago. Our bodies are designed to have a certain amount of physical stress and violence in them. We're designed to run from jaguars and fight to defend our territory.

The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man’s nature.

Sex doesn't have to be taught. It's something most of us are born with.

It's hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent.

You just can't take the doctor out of you.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

I think most people have a natural instinct to rebel.

I think that genetically we're programmed to battle each other.

I rely a great deal on animal instincts.

When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

I can't turn my aggression off and I can't turn it on; it's just instilled in me and that's how I play.