W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

The law is the survival of the fittest.... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation.

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

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

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.

As humans, we have evolved to compete... it is in our genes, and we love to watch a competition.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

My point of view is that men are basically animals, and I'm okay with that.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become.

Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.

We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.

We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

In accord with Nature’s Laws, nothing is more right than the preservation of one’s own race.

Before the tribunal of nature, a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence, if he can find within himself the powers with which to do it.

Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution, or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.

A stronger race will drive out the weaker ones, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will break down the absurd barriers of the so called humanity of individuals to make way for the humanity of nature which destroys the weak to give their place to the strong.

That a man lives is because he is straight. That a man who dupes others survives is because he has been fortunate enough to be spared.

The dangers of eating animal products occur after the age of reproduction. If people developed cardiovascular disease that was fatal by the age of twelve or thirteen, eating animals would have died out long ago. You get it after you've already reproduced.

... no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.

In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.