Francis Collins Quotes

We don't woo our wives with clubs. We don't leave old folks on ice floes. And maybe the time has come to quit diving into rip tides to save people we don't know. We've outgrown a lot of survival-of-the-fittest strategies, and risking our lives for strangers might be one of them.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

How can you regret helping a suffering patient?

Mankind deserves sacrifice - but not of mankind.

People are nicer than economists give us credit for. The economists cannot understand why people would work long and hard to clean up a community after a hurricane. … Most economists don’t have any interest in or understanding of psychology.

Surviving is not something you need to learn. You don't need to learn survival skills; you have them already. That's why we're here, all of us, because it's a game of survival anyway.

I truly believe that compassion provides the basis of human survival.

Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't the will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never cease to exist.

Even if they don't know it, everyone has the instinct to survive.

Politics is applied biology.

Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.

The instinct of self-preservation in human society, acting almost subconsciously, as do all drives in the human mind, is rebelling against the constantly refined methods of annihilation and against the destruction of humanity.

Grub first, then ethics.

Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish.

We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.

Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.

There would be no supporting life were we to feel quite as poignantly for others as we do for ourselves.

The great majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic or even beyond altruistic, as they risk themselves for others. We improvise the conditions of survival beautifully.

Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.

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

To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

Self-defence is Nature's eldest law.

For science, the end of the evolution struggle is simply represented by 'survival.' As for the means to that end, apparently anything goes. Darwinism leaves humanity without a moral compass.

Is it possible to covet a much longer life for one's self and be as devoted to the well-being of the next generation? It's a long argument.

An insatiable appetite for glory leads to sacrifice and death, but innate instinct leads to self-preservation and life.