Margaret Mead Quotes

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

Human nature is such that people are born with a love of profit If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die.

Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

We aren't, as human beings, very good at acting in our best interest.

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.

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

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

There is something good in men that really yearn for discipline.

As barbaric is we are, it's a miracle we haven't blown ourselves off the face of the earth so far.

Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.

The point of departure of the process to which we wish to contribute is the fact that war is the natural reaction of human nature in the savage state, while peace is the result of acquired characteristics.

Violence is man re-creating himself.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

I think that genetically we're programmed to battle each other.

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

Lust is an appetite that needs to be regulated.

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

I cannot be more aggressive than my nature makes me,.