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"Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms."
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"We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings."
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Personal Development

"Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree."
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Personal Development

"But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug."
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Personal Development

"Religion either produces the very best people or the very worst."
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Personal Development

"Those who most obstinately oppose the most widely - held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats."
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Personal Development

"But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else."
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Personal Development

"Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us."
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Personal Development

"Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs."
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Personal Development

"What fueled this hatred? Society."
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Personal Development

"A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination."
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Personal Development
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"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."
Science


"Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture."
Nature


"Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?"
People


"There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization."
Culture


"The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with."
Philosophy


"Personality and socialization aren't the same thing."
Personality


"People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without feeling a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we often forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago and become blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out."
Awareness


"Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?"
Mind


"Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate."
Children


"We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time."
Society
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