Enid Muriel Lyons Quotes

Politics is applied biology.

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

Life is no longer a contest of great minds for great ends, but a pot house squabble.

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

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.

Without game, men prey on each other.

The strongest absorbs the weakest, and he has a right to do so.

The most frequent reason why men desire to hurt each other, ariseth hence, that many men at the same time have an Appetite to the same thing; which yet very often they can neither enjoy in common, nor yet divide it.

I think the default position of humans is to be terrible, and we have to train it out of our children. That's just part of survival, right? Predator animals don't survive by being nice; humans are basically predator animals.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential high-mindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests.

The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

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?'

Westminster is a jungle - and the hunter can always smell fear on its prey.

We all seem to be about aggression and greed. It's a massive pressure that affects us all.

Everybody is struggling for the good things of the world, and all the arguments to prove that they are not desirable are worse than wasted.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

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

Politics is a blood sport.

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.

Power politics is another name for the law of the jungle.

The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery. The state has our instincts without our restraints.

All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.