Kenneth Scott Latourette Quotes

We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition

Genes are not destiny!

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

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

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

Character, I am sure, lies in the genes.

I think there's great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Genetics play a huge part in who we are. But we also have free will.

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to be like each other.

Improvement in social conditions will not compensate for a bad hereditary influence.

We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.

Man is the control experiment of heredity and environment; and since his heredity controls him, he tries to control his environment.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

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.

For there is nothing so social by nature, [and] so unsocial by its corruption, as this race.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

How can you compare the the masses of Western Europe with our people—so patient, so accustomed to privation?

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

All men are created equal in one respect, at least, and that is their desire to be unequal.