Arundhati Roy Quotes

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we think that we have free will and that our behavior can't be described by some mechanistic set of theorems or ideas. But even in terms of much of our behavior, we really aren't very different from other animals.

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.

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.

My point of view is that men are basically animals, and I'm okay with that.

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

That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.

We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain.

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

Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution, or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

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 biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

Of course we're all programmed genetically to some extent. But the "selfish gene" thesis doesn't explain everything.

It would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained.

A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.

I have been hit by the Americans and tortured. I have been beaten on every place of my body, and the signs are all over my body.

I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.

Evolution is not something to be feared. It's to be celebrated, embraced, and understood.

The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.

Pain wastes the Body, Pleasures the Understanding.

Sensibility would be a good portress if she had but one hand; with her right she opens the door to pleasure, but with her left to pain.

You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.