Robert Sapolsky Quotes

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.

Freedom was conditioned by man's physical body, heredity, and environment.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

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

Genetics play a huge part in who we are. But we also have free will.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

Every man is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

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

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

free will is a theologian's artifice.

The more, therefore, we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason

I don't believe that pure evil exists, personally.

You just are born the way that you're born.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

God made man to be free. Anybody can do whatever they want.

People are not born evil, although we all have evil within us.

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.

There are no coincidences in 'Westworld.'

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

It's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background ... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours - you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you - you were unlucky, that's all.

Man is without doubt the most interesting fool there is. He concedes that God made the angels immune from pain and death, and that he could have been similarly kind to man, but denies that he was under any moral obligation to do so.

Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.