Robert Sapolsky Quotes

When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.

I don't understand if you get caught in a fight, but take it out on a room, how that implies some psychiatric disorder.

Violent behavior exists in one's psychological makeup much deeper than the level that receives information from television or movies.

The last time I threw a punch was in primary school, and that was probably a slap.

When you fight, anger drives up testosterone in both men and women.

People's mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.

I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.

I was highly influenced by violence.

I was a tough kid. I don't punch people anymore.

I think that man is conditioned to violence.

Aggression is not the problem, is the outcome of a problem.

Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.

What difference does the uniform make? You don't hit with it.

I would never kill somebody, unless they pissed me off.

Even bullies need love.

It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.

His bark is worse than his bite.

Anger is stupid, and stupidity will kill you more surely than your opponent's blade.

It actually dawned on me that I don’t fight. I just kill whatever annoys me, and it’s over. (Savitar)

It is the cold glitter of the attacker's eye not the point of the questing bayonet that breaks the line.

This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence.

Adjustment? She called that an adjustment? How about I adjust her right out of existence?

Whenever thy hand can reach it, tear out the foe's brain, for such an opportunity washes anger from the mind.

Remind me," he paused, drawing in a stuttered gasp, "to never piss you off again. Christ, are you secretly a ninja?

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression.