Jeff Carlson Quotes

Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

I don't know why we're not interested in seeing good people. I think we like seeing good people, but only if bad things happen to them. Which is weird, isn't it?

People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world.

There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.

Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of the truth, when we see them so positive in their errors, which they will maintain out of their zeal for truth, although they contradict themselves every day of their lives.

The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

For once you must try not to shirk the facts: mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature.

Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both.

It is as though nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.

Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.

Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.

We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.

The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?