Aaaa > Aaaa's Quotes

“If you run from enemy fire, I'll make you wash dishes for the rest of your life!”
― Naoki Urasawa, 20th Century Boys, 19

“A child's growth is defined entirely by the adult that raises him.”
― Naoki Urasawa, Naoki Urasawa's Monster, Volume 3: 511 Kinderheim

“Does the hatred you feel ever disappear? Or is it something that never goes away... No matter how many times you try to erase it? What I have always feared the most... Is myself. Because I, too, have hatred inside me.”
― Naoki Urasawa, PLUTO: 浦沢直樹 x 手塚治虫 005 [Pluto: Urasawa Naoki x Tezuka Osamu 005]

“If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
”
― Robert M. Sapolsky

“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic.
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.”
― Robert M Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

“Being healthy consists of having the same disease as everyone else.”
― Robert Sapolsky

“Remarkably, studies have examined brains of transgender individuals, concentrating on brain regions that, on the average, differ in size between men and women. And consistently, regardless of the desired direction of the sex change and, in fact, regardless of whether the person had undergone a sex change yet, the dimorphic brain regions in transgender individuals resembled the sex of the person they had always felt themselves to be, not their “actual” sex. In other words, it’s not the case that transgender individuals think they’re a different gender than they actually are. It’s more like they got stuck with the bodies of a different sex from who they actually are.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile in the math SAT, there were 11 boys.
Why the difference? There have always been suggestions that testosterone is central. During development, testosterone fuels the growth of a brain region involved in mathematical thinking and giving adults testosterone enhances their math skills. Oh, okay, it's biological. But consider a paper published in science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in 40 countries based on economic, educational and political indices of gender equality. The worst was Turkey, United States was middling, and naturally, the Scandinavians were tops. Low and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries it's statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys. Footnote, note that the other reliable sex difference in cognition, namely better reading performance by girls than by boys doesn't disappear in more gender equal societies. It gets bigger. In other words, culture matters. We carry it with us wherever we go.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

“Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“...when doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be a norm - because at that instant, you have made it supremely difficult to ever again look objectively at an exception to that supposed norm.”
― Robert M Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

“Testosterone has far less to do with aggression than most assume. Within the normal range, individual differences in testosterone levels don’t predict who will be aggressive. Moreover, the more an organism has been aggressive, the less testosterone is needed for further aggression. When testosterone does play a role, it’s facilitatory—testosterone does not 'invent' aggression. It makes us more sensitive to triggers of aggression. Also, rising testosterone levels foster aggression only during challenges to status. Finally, crucially, the rise in testosterone during a status challenge does not necessarily increase aggression; it increases whatever is needed to maintain status. In a world in which status is awarded for the best of our behaviors, testosterone would be the most prosocial hormone in existence.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. The researchers then studied subjects from sixty-seven countries, considering the prevalence in each of belief in the existence of a heaven and hell. The greater the skew toward belief in hell, rather than heaven, the lower the national crime rate. When it comes to Eternity, sticks apparently work better than carrots.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex—the genetic programming for the young frontal cortex to be freer from genes than other brain regions, to be sculpted instead by environment, to sop up cultural norms. To hark back to a theme from the first pages of this book, it doesn’t take a particularly fancy brain to learn how to motorically, say, throw a punch. But it takes a fancy, environmentally malleable frontal cortex to learn culture-specific rules about when it’s okay to throw punches.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Sam Harris argues convincingly that it’s impossible to successfully think of what you’re going to think next. The takeaway from chapters 2 and 3 is that it’s impossible to successfully wish what you’re going to wish for. This chapter’s punchline is that it’s impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower. And that it isn’t a great idea to run the world on the belief that people can and should.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“Another literature compares cultures of rain forest versus desert dwellers, where the former tend toward inventing polytheistic religions, the latter, monotheistic ones. This probably reflects ecological influences as well—life in the desert is a furnace-blasted, desiccated singular struggle for survival; rain forests teem with a multitude of species, biasing toward the invention of a multitude of gods. Moreover, monotheistic desert dwellers are more warlike and more effective conquerors than rain forest polytheists, explaining why roughly 55 percent of humans proclaim religions invented by Middle Eastern monotheistic shepherds.[53]”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“There’s our nation with its cult of meritocracy that judges your worth by your IQ and your number of degrees. A nation that spews bilge about equal economic potential while, as of 2021, the top 1 percent has 32 percent of the wealth, and the bottom half less than 3 percent, where you can find an advice column headlined “It’s Not Your Fault if You Are Born Poor, but It’s Your Fault if You Die Poor,” which goes on to say that if that was your lamentable outcome, “I’ll say you’re a wasted sperm.”[18”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.”
― Robert Sapolsky