Steven Pinker Quotes

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

There's a real sense of fighting and destruction in our DNA that we don't get in touch with.

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?'

Without game, men prey on each other.

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

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

No matter how civilized we are and how much society has curbed violent behavior. Human beings still have the same genes they had 10,000 years ago. Our bodies are designed to have a certain amount of physical stress and violence in them. We're designed to run from jaguars and fight to defend our territory.

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.

It goes without saying that when survival is threatened, struggles erupt between peoples, and unfortunate wars between nations result.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

Man is a predatory animal, and this aspect of his nature is nowhere better suited by environment than in the world of politics.

What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the Earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.

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 think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

Even if they don't know it, everyone has the instinct to survive.

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

You and I probably wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't been greedy savages.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

I think its man's nature to go to war and fight.

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

I've always been fascinated by accounts of seemingly 'normal' people who have committed horrendous acts of cruelty and violence. You hear it on the news all the time.

As barbaric is we are, it's a miracle we haven't blown ourselves off the face of the earth so far.