Arthur Keith Quotes

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish.

Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.

What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are.

Perhaps the most mysterious of all mammals is the male Homo sapiens. Indeed, many anthropologists classify the group as a subspecies.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.

My primary interest has always been about exploring the human psyche and humanity.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

As soon as I know it's about technological things or spies, I lose interest. I want to know what goes on in people's minds.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

I have a deep fascination with human nature, with all its virtues and all its defects.

I like analyzing human behavior. It's complex. That's what keeps me going.

Every step in the progress of this study has tended to obliterate the technical barriers by which logicians have sought to separate the inquiries relating to the several parts of man's nature.

Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

I think the word 'soul' - it depends on what you define by 'soul.' If you're defining it as a mystical aura that is outside the body, I cannot measure that. If you're talking about soul as human nature, the rank of spectrum of behaviors and reactions that we know humans produce under certain circumstances, that is measurable.

This idea was also brought out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable activities of man might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning.

Human beings like variety, and they also like partnership... these are scientific values we can point to.

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.