Bertrand Russell Quotes

We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in.

I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?

Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time.

Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.

Why should he who is scared be careful?

The idea of safety had shrunk into particles - one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heightens the senses. Trusting one's hunches only seems gamble if one has time for seem; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks.

I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer

We're hard-wired by 200,000 years of evolution to be sensitive to the idea that someone might be watching us. They might be predators, after all. An uneasy feeling is perfectly natural if you suspect that someone has you in their ocular sights, whether it's a ghost or just some guy at the bus stop.

I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.

Worrying is a necessary part of life.

When we're threatened, it's very easy to appeal to our basic natures.

When you go down a dark alley and you feel that tingling across the back of your neck, that's not just a bad feeling, that's a biological gift from God - the Gift of Fear...when you ignore that gift - when you go down the dark alley and say, Y'know, I'm sure it'll be okay - that's when you find real pain.

The more experience and insight I obtain into human nature, the more convinced do I become that the greater portion of a man is purely animal.

We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings.

Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

Hatred is never anything but fear - if you feared no one, you would hate no one.

It seemed his demon couldn't tell the physical difference between when he was in danger and when he was "in" Danger.

Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.

Romantic love is not an emotion. ... It's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind.

The absent danger greater still appears less fears he who is near the thing he fears.

Fear is only good when you have a choice in things.

Fear is the most costly of all the human emotions, even though most fears have no foundation in fact.

The pain I felt was my father's pain.

Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men's tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.

It's not that big a mystery about types. It's not even that big a mystery why so many people are picking up on things now. It's like we were talking about the primitive thing before and all that. Nothing has really changed much. The things that have changed are like we're on the noon now. There are more buildings now. But we're still basically two monkeys sitting here.