Michael Fassbender Quotes

Back when we were Neanderthals or whatever, we evolved to think along tribal lines. Survival was based on this idea of who are we and who are the others who will come and take our resources. I think it's an animal and a human thing that we all see in terms of us vs. them, and race is a very easy way to separate who is us and who is them.

It shows 'us vs. them', and I'm on the 'us' side.

So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the 'global village' we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. There was absolutely no harm in being part of a small group - indeed, with our hunter-gatherer band mentality it gave comfort, provided us with an inner circle of friends who could be utterly trusted, who were absolutely reliable. It helped give us peace of mind. The danger came only from drawing that sharp line, digging that ditch, laying that minefield, between our own group and any other group that thought differently.

I think there is tribalism is a big deal inside of the church, that the church thinks of themselves as a tribe and not a mission.

I don't see tribalism ever really disappearing entirely. I just think that people are almost hardwired to identify as groups. And that sort of group identity always runs the risk of being chauvinistic.

The phenomena there is something in us that on the one hand bonds us with like people but somehow makes us suspicious of other people.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.

The idea is, we're still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves. We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough to know what acceptance feels like. We bond together based on anything that we can - music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.

The individualism of the Arab has been erased from this society.

We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.

All people - white, black, whatever - are tribal in the sense that we relate to that which is familiar to us.

The key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an 'us' and who is a 'them' at any given moment.

I think it's just in human nature: if you've got two guys fighting, and you don't really know them, you're going to root for the guy who comes from your country.

The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.

I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.

Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

The last six years afforded me much time and food for thought. I came to the conclusion that the human race is not divided into two opposing camps of good and evil. It is made up of those who are capable of learning and those who are incapable of doing so.

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.