Steven Pressfield Quotes

We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.

Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time.

The primary concern of the human animal is to avoid rejection and abandonment.

We have nightmares because our brain is running simulations to put us in jeopardy to see what we'll do or to acclimatize us to that idea that something bad could happen. It's just how human beings are wired because the entire time we were evolving we had to jump quick or the leopard would get us or whatever it was. It's Darwinian.

Everyone fears rejection.

I feel like I have been portrayed as if I was standing outside Cipriani hoping someone picks me as their plus-one.

Hey, we've all been to high school We've seen the in-crowds. Most of us have been in the outer crowds, the people who weren't in. Although I was never in, I was selling records and was very happy.

But, sir, they have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers.

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.

No one is out to get you. It's just that... people are monkeys.

Put simply, behavioural economics argues that human beings' decision-taking is guided by the evolutionary baggage which we bring with us to the present day. Evolution has made us rational to a point, but not perfectly so. It has given us emotions, for example, which programme us to override our rational brain and act more instinctively.

Throughout evolution, ostracism was death indeed.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

You take the risk of being rejected.

Even at church, people would not shake my hand.

Nobody likes to be rejected, you know?

You build up coming out to this horrible moment. It's so stressful, there's so much adrenaline, and there's so much primal fear - even though I know my parents to be good people - that they're going to reject you.

I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?

The system is very well regulated in L.A. It's designed to disconnect you from whatever your idea of yourself is. If you're among devils and they realise you're not a devil like they are, there's gonna be some great discomfort.

I can take too big a step. I can try to be too cool, and people won't accept that.

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.

Middle school was what programmed me to be semi-insecure, like, all of the time. I didn’t fit in….I’d stand on the outside of the circle but I was never really in. That’s when I started to realize there’s this thing called rejection.

The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.

I was considered the black sheep of the family, neighbours didn't want their kids playing with me.