Quotes on Natura humana

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There is a quasi-scientific fable that if you can get a frog to sit quietly in a saucepan of cold water, and if you then raise the temperature of the water very slowly and smoothly so that there is no moment marked to be the moment at which the frog should jump, he will never jump. He will get boiled. Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan?
 
Human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees are to the other apes.
 
The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.
 
Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
 
We are, in the twenty-first century, as we’ve always been: great apes hunting connection and status inside shared hallucinations.
 
In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
 
We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.
 
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
 
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined
 
We may be seeing a coming together of the humanities and the science of human nature.
 
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.
 
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
 
All of us have a theory about human nature.
 
What one does, one becomes.
 
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
 
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
 
My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
 
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
 
18 quotes