“Understanding genetic control is understanding we’re all puppets and our best hope for even partial liberation is deciphering the logic of the puppeteer [who has] exactly zero regard for the happiness of the puppets.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“In one experiment, 3/4 of the men approached by an unknown woman on a college campus agreed to have sex with her, whereas none of the women approached by an unknown man were willing.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Natural selection may favor males that are good at deceiving females about their future devotion and favor females that are good at spotting deception… the better one side gets, the better the other side gets.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“The minds of men are an evolutionary record of the past behavior of women. And vice versa.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“emotions are just evolution’s executioners… stratagems of the genes… genetic weapons”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“A huge majority—980 of the 1154 past or present societies for which anthropologists have data—have permitted a man to have more than one wife… [but] most marriages have been monogamous”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“as political power became more widely disbursed, so did wives… one-man-one-vote and one-man-one-wife… monogamy is a straightforward expression of political [and economic] equality among men”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“An unmarried man 24-35 is about 3x as likely to murder another male as a married man of the same age… leaving lots of men without wives and children is not just inegalitarian; it’s dangerous…”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“serial monogamy, de facto polygyny… the sort of country we already live in… is, in an important sense, the worst of all worlds… inequality among males is more socially destructive than inequality among women.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Monogamy is threatened by the relative wealth of the wealthy… one of the best ways to strengthen monogamous marriage s to more equally distribute income.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“We deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better… Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“The choice [between monogamy and polygyny] isn’t between equality and inequality. It’s between equality among men and equality among women.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Zen is for poets, Tibetan Buddhism is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“You can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“Pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“By looking at things from the point of view of natural selection, we see why the illusion would be built into us, and we have more reason than ever to see that it is an illusion.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“Natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“The conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“What causes all the hatred?… human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real us’; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real them.’”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“In fact, one big lesson from Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“Why Buddhism is true: because we are animals created by natural selection.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“I consider tribalism the biggest problem of our time… it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration… just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“Realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“The mental machinery that drives modern wars—patriotic fervor, mass self-righteousness, contagious rage—have their deepest roots in... conflicts among coalitions of males for status.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“The best friends are the ones who see each other least clearly… Friends engage in mutual inflation. Being a person’s true friend means endorsing the untruths he hold dearest… Self-love becomes a mutual admiration society.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest… honesty can be a major blunder.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Social hierarchy can assume many forms, and in every human society it seems to find one… the deeply human hunger for status and the seemingly universal presence of hierarchy… it becomes doubtful that any truly egalitarian human society has ever existed… Is inequality indeed, as Darwin suggested, a prerequisite for economic or political advancement?”

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“As enlightenment begins to dawn, reality, which had seemed all chopped up, turns out to possess an underlying continuity, a kind of infrastructure of interconnection.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“The sense of beauty feels more like something the mind just naturally relaxes into when the preoccupation with self subsides.”

from Why Buddhism is True

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“Free will is an illusion, brought to us by evolution.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“All the things we are commonly blamed or praised for—ranging from murder to theft to Darwin’s eminently Victorian politeness—are the result not of choices made by some immaterial 'I' but of physical necessity.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“The only potentially immortal organic entity is a gene — or, strictly speaking, the pattern of information encoded in the gene, since the physical gene itself will pass away after conveying the pattern through replication”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“One great spur to divorce is the belief of many men (and no few women) that somehow they just married the 'wrong' person and next time they'll get it 'right.' Not likely. Divorce statistics support Samuel Johnson's characterization of a man's decision to remarry as 'the triumph of hope over experience.'”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“lasting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural — not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires, for lack of a better term, what we can call an act of will.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Natural selection's disdain for the principle of truth in advertising is widely evident... organisms may present themselves as whatever it is in their genetic interest to seem like. People appear to be no exception.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“evolution not only invented romantic love, but, from the beginning, corrupted it.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Not only have males evolved to compete for scare female eggs; females have evolved to compete for scare male investment.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Divorce can happen in hunter-gatherer societies; men did up and leave after fathering a child or two... the lifestyle of the modern philandering bachelor–seducing and abandoning available women year after year... is just what happens when you take the male mind, with its preference for varied sex partners, and put it in a big city replete with contraceptive technology.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Brotherly love in the literal sense comes at the expense of brotherly love in the biblical sense; the more precisely we bestow unconditional kindness on relatives, the less of it is left over for others.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“giving men marriage tips is a little like offering Vikings a free booklet titled, 'How Not to Pillage.'”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“one way to ensure that male infidelity doesn't lead to desertion is to confine it to, well, whores... few Victorian men sat at the breakfast table daydreaming about leaving their wives for the prostitute they had enjoyed the night before.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“most men are probably better off in a monogamous system and most women worse off... the only underprivileged citizens who should favor monogamy are men... it gives them access to a bevy of women that would otherwise drip up the social scale.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“If female infidelity weren't a long-standing part of life in this species, why would distinctly maniacal male jealousy have evolved?”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“two studies have found that women going to a singles bar wear more jewelry and makeup when near ovulation.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“female reticence left males competing with one another for scarce reproductive opportunities... why males so often have built-in weapons... males not hereditarily equipped for combat with other males have been excluded from sex and their traits have thus been discarded by natural selection.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Darwin took comfort in the hope that his insights would never become common.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“blame and punishment are as practically necessary as they are intellectually vacuous”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“[If we] give up on free will; no one really deserves blame or credit for anything; we are all slaves of biology.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“The one thing harder on children than divorce is parents to stay together even though locked in mortal combat.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“women weren't designed to be suburban housewives”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Victorianism went well beyond simple, general repression—the temptation of aging, affluent, or high-status men to desert their wives for a younger model—was met with great social firepower... The double standard may have bolstered monogamy, but these days it brings divorce.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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“Luck is the thing that makes you fail and other people succeed; ability works the other way around.”

from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

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