psychological predisposition Quotes

You can be born gay, but not because of your genetics, I think because of your subconscious more than your genetics. I think genetically, we're made to reproduce. We can't survive this route. Genetically, that's the way to go. Genetically, we have to reproduce, but subconsciously, and preferentially, you can be born with that.

In most instances, the driving force behind the action is the mood, the personality, the attitude of the character - or all three. Therefore, the mind is the pilot. We think of things before the body does them.

I was always crazy even before the drugs.

It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

Human psychology is attuned to the negative. It’s called the negativity bias. We dread bad things more than we savor good things.

About the nature of human beings. I discovered that confronted by temptation, we will always fall. Given the right circumstances, every human being on this earth would be willing to commit evil.

I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.

I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.

That was interesting, to find that it wasn't hunger that caused children to become bullies on the street. The bulliness was already in the child, and whatever the stakes were, they would find a way to act as they needed to act. … Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn't make any important difference in human nature.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

People always say, when did you realize you were funny? And I think it's not that you realize you were funny. It's that you're brain works in a certain way. And I don't think that that's - I think in some respects it's uncontrollable, and you can either accept it and deal with it and hone it or you can try to fight it. And I was too weak to fight it.

I think that [Paul] Bloom's approach - and others who take it - is not so much that there is a precise genetic basis to faith. But there is a genetic basis to a psychological predisposition that manifests itself as faith and religion under the right conditions.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?