Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.

Human Nature Baby, grab it and growl.

The active part of man consists of powerful instincts.

Human nature is largely something that has to be overcome.

The more experience and insight I obtain into human nature, the more convinced do I become that the greater portion of a man is purely animal.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.

Be careful what you choose to do consciously, for unless your will is very strong, that is what you may have to do repeatedly and compulsively through the habit-influencing power of the subconscious mind.

For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him

You can see the true heart of a man when you're out in the woods with a weapon

Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.

Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.

Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one's will over long periods of time in the form of legislation and customs.

If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.

We may be human, but we're still animals.

It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit

If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

When we're threatened, it's very easy to appeal to our basic natures.

Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.

I rely a great deal on animal instincts.

We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we ­persist in self-­centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

Man is dragged hither and thither, at one moment by the blind instincts of the forest, at the next by the strange intuitions of a higher self whose rationale he doubts and does not understand.

"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.