Sigmund Freud Quotes

I wonder whether being a scientist's daughter makes you so conflicted about free will and fate.

You just are born the way that you're born.

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.

The conundrum of free will and destiny has always kept me dangling.

All activities and events that a body is to go through are determined at the time of conception.

We don't invent our natures. They're issued to us along with our lungs, our pancreas and everything else.

The most important thing to realize is we're not blank slates at birth. We don't start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There's something in our heads on the day we're born, and then we grow up and make choices.

Emotionally men and women are different, but only as a result of the physical differences. It all comes back to our bodies.

We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.

It is futile to go against human nature.

There is no escaping from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture.

I am of the school that believes, for the most part, that gays are born and not made. That is, I believe - and there appears to be significant scientific evidence to back me up - that there is a genetic predisposition to be gay.

It's insanely difficult for people to accept the extent to which we are biological organisms without agency.

I don't think 'Motherhood' is a map for women. I would never say that it's a template for every woman in response to her biology.

God knew everything I would go through before I ever went through it.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

Homosexuality is genetically hardwired but race and gender are only ideas. OK. Just trying to keep up.

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.

Let's admit that feminism came from liberalism and it was very positive. But then it went dark. It went into a bad place. When feminism replaced biology with social construct, they started to say that everything about a human being was created by your environment or by your - by environmental cues as opposed to innate traits... Like you didn't achieve what you could get because it was your fault. They denied traits that are applied across all cultures. And that's where feminism went wrong is it denied biology and makes them look foolish.

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.

I cannot say that I have been hindered all my life by the permutation of genes that resulted in me being born a woman.

Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity.

But no earthly foot can step between a man and his destiny.

In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.

Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.