B. F. Skinner Quotes

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

Every human being has a bit of gangster in him.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

I thought if I could understand why apes get mean and horrible and aggressive when they grow up, maybe I could understand why people get mean and horrible and aggressive and have wars.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

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

Biology always beats will power.

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

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.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal.

Fighting is not a man's thing, it is a human thing.

Our aggression is a deep instinct which survives in all kinds of manifestations in modern man.

Violent People: Are they the cause of violence or are their genes?

To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature.

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

You can think you know somebody. But when they're trying to punch you in the face, you really know somebody. You learn their tendencies.

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

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

There are people who just love to destroy other people. It saddens me to admit that, I think, at whatever state of human civilisation we arrive at, the will to destroy other people is something that is innate in some people.

We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

War grows out of ordinary human nature.

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.