Innate Tendencies Quotes

I've always been conservative. I was born that way.

Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.

I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.

Human Nature Baby, grab it and growl.

The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.

War is to man what maternity is to a woman

The things that are more my own style are something that I don't really have to think about. The only time I have to think about them is if I want to force myself not to do it the way I do it.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

We may be human, but we're still animals.

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

Human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instructions.

There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome." "And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them.

Biology always beats will power.

You can be born gay, but not because of your genetics, I think because of your subconscious more than your genetics. I think genetically, we're made to reproduce. We can't survive this route. Genetically, that's the way to go. Genetically, we have to reproduce, but subconsciously, and preferentially, you can be born with that.

As a result of a general defect of nature, we are either more confident or more fearful of unusual and unknown things.

Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.

... the cooperative forces are biologically the more important and vital. The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself. Our tendencies toward goodness... are as innate as our tendencies toward intelligence; we could do well with more of both.

The active part of man consists of powerful instincts.

Some of us were born to hate and some of us were born to be great.

What's bred in the bone will stick to the flesh.

There are very few men and women in whom a Universalist feeling is altogether lacking; its prevalence suggests that it must be part of our inborn nature and have a place in Nature's scheme of evolution.

Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time.

It's the nature of the beast within us to keep going back to the familiar rather than to strap on faith and face the future.