E. O. Wilson Quotes

I used to think that capitalism was human nature. Now I know that it is culture.

Against human nature one cannot legislate.

We are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.

War is no more inevitable than the plague is inevitable. War is no more a part of human nature than the burning of witches is a human act.

Children are like men, the experience of others does not help them.

The world looks different and is understood differently at every spot on earth. Without accepting this simple truth it is hard for us to grasp the behavior of others, the motives and aims of those actions.

There is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established.

It is futile to go against human nature.

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct-- if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

We are a very, very unusual species.

Because I grew up in Africa, I always see people and try to understand characters as what kind of animal they'd be.

A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.

Culture is a part of basic human nature, of deep humanity.

The human animal varies from class to class, culture to culture. In one way we are consistent: We are irrational.

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.

Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.

You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it.

The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.

All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.

I think that sexuality is the part of human beings that is closest to nature. And nature is dangerous somehow, yes, if you put nature against civilisation, nature is definitely a threat.

Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Facilities was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other or farther Enquiries.

I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.

I'm very interested in people, so if a character happens to be real, there's that much more to look at.

The proper study of Mankind is Everything.