top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Biology quotes
"Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them."
"New cells are born everyday and old cells die, but they have neither funerals nor birthdays."
"But cocks aren't supposed to lay eggs... Sahil said, trying to untangle himself. "...they're supposed to fertilise them."
"If you feel depressed for an hour, you've produced approximately eighteen billion new cells that have more receptors calling out for depressed - type peptides and fewer calling out for feel - good peptides."
"Washburn has reported that infant baboons and other young primates appear to be born with only three inborn fears -of falling, snakes, and the dark-corresponding respectively to the dangers posed byNewtonian gravitation to tree-dwellers, by our ancient enemies the reptiles, and by mammalian nocturnal predators, which must have been particularly terrifying for the visually oriented primates."
"A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners."
"Periods are a period when nature forces prostitutes to go on leave."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker
"Friendship, like other kinds of altruism, is vulnerable to cheaters, and we have a special name for them: fair-weather friends. These sham friends reap the benefits of associating with a valuable person and mimic signs of warmth in an effort to become valued themselves. But when a little rain falls, they are nowhere in sight."
"Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later."
"The psychological components of war have not gone away-dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception."
"It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible."
"Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist "Take Back the Night protests) made these environments safer for everyone."
"Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world."
"By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu."
"Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable, it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."
"In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires."
"We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives."
bottom of page