Binyavanga Wainaina Quotes

I've always been fascinated by accounts of seemingly 'normal' people who have committed horrendous acts of cruelty and violence. You hear it on the news all the time.

His passion has aroused the best and the beast in man. And the beast waited for him in the kitchen.

The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

It was a natural process, because when we go to the ring we are human beings, but once you feel the punches and the competition that's when the beast comes out and takes hold of us.

Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite - a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

There's a real sense of fighting and destruction in our DNA that we don't get in touch with.

The part that always shocked me was the inter-community violence among the chimps: the patrols and the vicious attacks on strangers that lead to death. It's an unfortunate parallel to human behavior - they have a dark side just as we do. We have less excuse, because we can deliberate, so I believe only we are capable of true calculated evil.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

There is a dark side in all of us. And for us 'bad' people, the bad side dominates. I think there is a great sadness in villains, and I have tried to put that across. We cannot stop ourselves doing what we are doing.

I think that there's a hidden darkness in all of us!

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal.

Our aggression is a deep instinct which survives in all kinds of manifestations in modern man.

We have beastly qualities within us. If we're put into certain circumstances, and the walls around us come in tighter and tighter, we all could maybe do dangerous things.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

Some might argue humans are hard-wired to fight. I don't agree: we are conscious beings who have the capacity to make decisions.

Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.

I have never killed anybody, it is true, but it is because I lacked the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire

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

We're animals. We're violent.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

And everybody has the motivation to be that killer.

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war... Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong... Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings... Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe.