Sigmund Freud Quotes

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.

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

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.

I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.

Behavior is mutable. It changes from place to place. It's like accents, dialect - it varies from one area to another. But there are universal truths about what it means to be a human being. All the other stuff is like applique. Learning that was interesting to me and probably useful for becoming an actor.

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

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.

I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive.

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.'

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

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.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

If we allow the passions of our men to get full command then indeed will this war become a reproach to the names of liberty and civilization.

The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be.

What people will - or will not - laugh at is mainly determined by their social conditioning.

A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.

In TV, you look to make characters consistent, but in real life, we're not consistent. Sometimes we're brave, and sometimes we're not. Sometimes we're very aggressive, and sometimes we back right down.

Look, people have been filming fights since the beginning of time.

I grew up as a boy with aggression.

Humans, the supremely social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb, for good or ill, the influences that surround us.

If you was somewhere walking down the street and somebody says something crazy to you, you're going to react. So just because it's a basketball event doesn't mean those emotions go out the door or us being a human being goes out the door. It's the same thing.