Robert Winston Quotes

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

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

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.

Without game, men prey on each other.

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.

My experience is that aggression is a universal trait in human beings - girls feel it in any sort of environment, same-sex or co-ed.

Even if they don't know it, everyone has the instinct to survive.

It was a natural process, because when we go to the ring we are human beings, but once you feel the punches and the competition that's when the beast comes out and takes hold of us.

Every human being has a bit of gangster in him.

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

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?'

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'

Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature.

Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but ... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.

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

I love football and basketball but fighting is the original, most primitive to our nature.

Everybody has a savage instinct.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

Some might argue humans are hard-wired to fight. I don't agree: we are conscious beings who have the capacity to make decisions.

Basically, we are all chimps. The human side is at the front of our forehead, but the chimp is the part that lashes out. When I play, I am completely chimp-orientated.

The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.