Michel Foucault Quotes

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

Politics is applied biology.

Human nature is such that people are born with a love of profit If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die.

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?'

Life on earth is a hand-to-hand mortal combat... between the law of love and the law of hate.

I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.

There's a real sense of fighting and destruction in our DNA that we don't get in touch with.

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.

The point of departure of the process to which we wish to contribute is the fact that war is the natural reaction of human nature in the savage state, while peace is the result of acquired characteristics.

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

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.

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

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.

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

Man is a competitive creature, and the seeds of conflict are built deep into our genes. We fought each other on the savannah and only survived against great odds by organising ourselves into groups which would have had a common purpose, giving morale and fortitude.

The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.

Haven’t we learned that when you go to war, the outcome is unpredictable.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

Violence is literally the glue of the cycle of life, and yet I think that we're the only species that does it maliciously.

From ancient to modern times, the human animal knows how to find fighting.

War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown.

People engaged in a war do not lose temper over matters which affect the fortunes of war.

No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.

'So if we can we'll kill every last of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us. As for me,' said Ender, 'I'm in favor of surviving'.