Stephen King Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

The logical outcome of evolution is that it makes monsters. We turn into monsters because evolution takes away everything that makes us human in the sense of our moral accountability, our moral absolutes, and our idea of being distinct from the animal kingdom.

What is the Law of the Jungle? Strike first and then give tongue.

The right question to ask from a Darwinian prospective is what was it about bipedalism that was so advantageous? Why did it lead to a - why did that adaptation ultimately lead to a species Homo sapiens that has come to dominate the planet today with six and a half billion people?

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective.

There's something really interesting about how human beings just want to see animals tear each other apart, maybe because we can't do it.

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

Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

I don't think anyone can be more of a predator than a human being.

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

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.

We have enforced a Darwinian process on wolves, turning them into the shy and elusive animals they've become. They didn't have that fear of us 30,000 years ago. We didn't have gunpowder; we had rocks. Wolves would have seen us as lunch, and we were weak and slow and tasty.

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.

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.

I really knew I wanted to be Adam, because Adam was the first man. Ant I chose because, if there's a nuclear explosion, the ants will survive.

Many people, whether religious believers or not, were repelled by the idea that we humans are nothing more special than a species of mammal directly descended from the higher primates, and that we achieved that status by winning a long struggle, shockingly red, as Tennyson famously put it, “in tooth and claw