Alan Kay Quotes

Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Before language, cavemen simply grunted, and then they used the club. Communication changed that. It's the mechanism that created civilization and prevents its own destruction.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

I'm really puzzled by why people in societies find it difficult to work collaboratively together with other people in societies.

No community ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

Look, not everybody plays well with each other on the playground. I get that, that's politics.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

In a very alert and bright state of society people learn co-operation by themselves, but in older and quieter conditions of laboring enterprise, such a bill as I propose will point out the way to mutual exertion.

In any group there is more or less tension between people, and there are complicities and affinities.

We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way.

Indeed, if our ancestors of millions of years ago hadn't learned how to care for one another and hunt in packs, they'd all have ended up being eaten by leopards.

It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

Just as the mind emerges from the actions of individual neurons and their cooperation, the success of an organization emerges not only from its individual participants, but also from the interplay between them.

We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants.

There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.

I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.

Every combination of two or more human beings has both a useful aspect and a political aspect.

The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.