Nurture vs Nature, Nurture vs. Nature Quotes

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

You're not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

If you allow young folk to be abominably brought up and their characters corrupted little by little, from childhood; and if then you punish them as grown-ups for committing the crimes to which their training has consistently inclined them, what else is this, I ask, but first making thieves and then punishing them for it?

There is no escaping from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture.

Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.

The influence of one's parents is powerful and permanent.

Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.

You can improve your education and even change your environment but what you really ARE was all settled when your parents www born. SELECTED PARENTS WILL HAVE BETTER CHILDREN.

I think my parents undoubtedly influenced me on some level.

What's odd is that nobody in my family is an artist. My cousins are, like, secretaries at law firms or nurses or just more blue collar. And I was in a baseball team. I used to be, like, a really big tomboy.

Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.

There is no longer a doubt that women are just as competent as men. Gender differences are guided by nurture, as society treats boys and girls differently from an early age.

You are what you choose to identify with. You have the choice. A mouse raised by pigeons.

I don't believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything - I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I'd been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos.

Character isn't inherited.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that most champions are born into certain environments and encouraged early. Then, later on, they might get some assistance from their federations.

It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived.

Like begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees... . Abused soil brings forth stunted growths.

Good heredity and environment are necessary. You cannot compare the child of a savage with the child of a civilized person.

Both of our children are adopted, and my wife and I didn't go out of ways to find kids that looked like us. We were just happy to have some kids. And people tell me all the time that they look like us, and that's because they learn to smile and laugh and move their head a certain way from studying their parents' faces.

I think my personality is not because I was born this way but because I was raised this way. I was raised with a lot of fun, a lot of joy, a lot of happiness, a lot of passion, and that's how my family is.

We are such a product of our upbringing and environment.

Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.

The tiniest bits of opinion sown in the minds of children in private life afterwards issue forth to the world, and become its public opinion; for nations are gathered out of nurseries.

Men are what their mothers made them.