David Livingstone Quotes

God, send me anywhere, only go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. And sever any tie in my heart except the tie that binds my heart to Yours.

If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.

I will go anywhere, provided it be forward.

All that I am I owe to Jesus Christ, revealed to me in His divine Book.

If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?

There is one safe and happy place, and that is in the will of God.

Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair.

I will place no value on anything I have or may possess except in relation to the kingdom of Christ.

The best remedy for a sick church is to put it on a missionary diet.

Sympathy is no substitute for action.

Christ alone can save the world, but Christ cannot save the world alone.

God had an only Son and He made Him a missionary.

This generation can only reach this generation.

Before dehumanizing a population, we set them apart as a "race." That is, a variety of people who are fundamentally different from "us." The folk notion of race is very much an artificial construction.

I place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of God. If anything will advance the interests of the kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving or keeping it I shall most promote the glory of Him to whom I owe all my hopes in time or eternity.

Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’ ‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

I have found that I have no unusual endowments of intellect, but this day I resolve that I will be an uncommon Christian.

Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren’t lying around waiting to be discovered. They’re made, not found.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene.

Social psychologists confirm that we are likely to perceive people outside our own community as more alike than those within it. We perceive members of our own group as individuals, but see other groups as more or less homogenous (psychologists call this the “outgroup homogeneity bias”).

Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.

Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts. —Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand

To perceive others as fully human means to be saddened by the death of every single person, regardless of the population, group, or part of the world from which he comes, and regardless of our own personal acquaintance with him. If we accord him identity, then we must individualize his death [and] … if we accord him community, then we must experience his death as a personal loss.

For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

Self-deception is an indispensable element of war, and that despite the fact that wars are calculated and planned, there is a sense in which human beings do not know what they are doing when they cut one another down on the battlefield.

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.

If we have not enough in our religion to share it with all the world, it is doomed here at home.

Once, during the Siege of Boston, when almost nothing was going right and General Schuyler had written from Albany to bemoan his troubles, Washington had replied that he understood but that “we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.” It was such resolve and an acceptance of mankind and circumstances as they were, not as he wished them to be, that continued to carry Washington through. “I will not however despair,” he now wrote to Governor William Livingston.

Terrorism" is a word with little content - it is a label for brutalities committed by "the enemy", and from which one's own acts of destruction are exempted. It is an inchoate and emotionally laden concept, a semantic mirror of our dishonesty and a repository for everything about war that we would like to disavow. Making a sharp distinction between war and terrorism is at best a self-deceptive game.

We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. Hence … in poetry … trees, mountains, and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.

The impressive record of atrocities racked up by the human race does not suggest that our conduct is guided by sympathy for others.

A poll of U.S. servicemen indicated that 44 percent would like to kill a Japanese soldier while only 6 percent felt the same way about Germans.

It is not all pleasure this exploration.

The history of humanity is, to a very great extent, a history of violence.

DO NOT THINK ME MAD. IT IS NOT TO MAKE MONEY THAT I BELIEVE A CHRISTIAN SHOULD LIVE. THE NOBLEST THING A MAN CAN DO IS JUST HUMBLY TO RECEIVE AND THEN GO AMONGST OTHERS AND GIVE.” —David Livingstone

Presenting the world a stiff upper lip was not enough anymore. Now Speke needed to endure—to persevere. Or, as Nile duel moderator David Livingstone liked to say, Speke would need to “Bash on, regardless.

Note that having a large brain is biologically costly: the brain is an expensive organ to run, and large ones consume many precious calories (the human brain accounts for a whopping 20 percent of our energy expenditure).

A 1945 film called Japan: Know Your Enemy, directed by Frank Capra (who directed several popular motion pictures during the 1930s and ’40s, including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It’s a Wonderful Life)

Rabbi Isaac Luria was a faithful follower of Ignatius Loyola.8

To understand war, we must understand ourselves.

Surely the vilest of animals in Allah’s sight are those who disbelieve. —THE KORAN

I will go anywhere, provided it is forward.

..scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.

Mark a hen’s comb with an oddly colored spot, or tie it so it hangs in a peculiar direction, and her former flock mates will attack her mercilessly. Jane Goodall, who was the first scientist to observe chimpanzees up close and personal in the wild, noticed that crippled chimpanzees were rejected and attacked by apes that were previously on friendly terms with them.

Early Muslim references to dehumanization were overtly ethnocentric. Almost without exception, the people who are transformed into subhuman creatures—specifically, pigs, apes, and rats—are Jews.

My views of what is missionary duty are not so contracted as those whose ideal is a dumpy sort of man with a Bible under his arm,” Livingstone explained. “I have labored in bricks and mortar, at the forge and at the carpenter’s bench, as well as in preaching and medical practice. I feel that I am ‘not my own.’ I am serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men, or taking an astronomical observation.

If it weren’t for the great Scottish missionary David Livingstone, the Yao and Chewa might still be at odds today. Livingstone helped end slavery, opened Malawi to trade, and built good schools and missions. Young men became educated and earned money, and once these economic opportunities were available to all, our two tribes had little reason to fight. Today we consider the Yao our brothers and sisters. My

Three years earlier, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq became public, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio broadcaster in the United States, whose syndicated radio show has, at last count, 13 million listeners—described the prisoners who had been killed, raped, tortured, and humiliated by or at the behest of U.S. military personnel, as less than human. “They are the ones who are sick,” fumed Limbaugh.

Like it or not, war is distinctively human. Apart from the raiding behavior of chimpanzees and the so-called wars prosecuted by certain species of ant, there is nothing in nature that comes anywhere near approximating it.

19th March, 1872.—Birthday. My Jesus, my king, my life, my all; I again dedicate my whole self to Thee. Accept me, and grant, Gracious Father, that ere this year is gone I may finish my task. In Jesus' name I ask it. Amen, so let it be.

n medieval Europe, a new slave would place his head under his master’s arm, and have a strap placed around his neck, in imitation of a sheep or cow, and in eighteenth-century Britain, goldsmiths advertised silver padlocks “For blacks or dogs.

everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.’ ‘This is supposed to be news to us. News flash: We’re going to die.

Slavery is as old as civilization, and has been practiced all over the world. It was ubiquitous in antiquity, and is taken for granted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (you may recall that Paul enjoined slaves to obey their masters “in fear and trembling” as they would Christ),

For dehumanization to occur the target group must first be essentialized. They, the others, must be seen as a distinct kind of person: not just superficially different, but radically so. This pattern is borne out by all of the cases of dehumanization that have been surveyed so far in this book.

David Livingstone lived in the realm of prayer and knew its gracious influence. It was his habit every birthday to write a prayer, and on the next to the last birthday of all, this was his prayer: “O Divine one, I have not loved Thee earnestly, deeply, sincerely enough. Grant, I pray Thee, that before this year is ended I may have finished my task.” It was just on the threshold of the year that followed that his faithful men, as they looked into the hut of Ilala, while the rain dripped from the eaves, saw their master on his knees beside his bed in an attitude of prayer. He had died on his knees in prayer.

In a typically grandiose description of the military exploits of Pharaoh Amenemhet I, who ruled Egypt from 1985 to 1956 BCE, the enemies of Egypt are represented as nonhuman predators. “I subdued lions, I captured crocodiles,” he boasted. “I repressed those of Wawat, I captured the Medjai, I made the Asiatics do the dog walk.

—What is the atonement of Christ? It is Himself: it is the inherent and everlasting mercy of God made apparent to human eyes and ears. The everlasting love was disclosed by our Lord's life and death. It showed that God forgives, because He loves to forgive. He works by smiles if possible, if not by frowns; pain is only a means of enforcing love.

Michael Savage (the pseudonym of Michael Alan Weiner) is another popular radio host whose syndicated radio program is followed by 8 to 10 million listeners. Like Limbaugh, Savage derided the detainees as “subhuman” and “vermin,” and suggested that forcible conversion to Christianity is “probably the only thing that can turn them into human beings.

Unlike these verses from the Koran, references to dehumanization in the hadith compiled two or three centuries later have a distinctly anti-Jewish flavor. They describe how a group of Israelites were transformed into rats, how unbelievers are turned into monkeys and pigs, and how Abraham’s father was transformed into an animal and hurled into the raging fires of hell.

To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system—the twelve-year reign of the Nazis—can be created, it can be dismantled. We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” “It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration,” wrote the philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has studied cultures of dehumanization. “It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.

If people with good reputations are a resource for whom others compete, this leads to all the dirty tricks that people use against one another when they are competing for something of value. One such move is to “poison the well,” to destroy the perceived value of the resource. When the resource is a person’s reputation, some individuals will spread malicious gossip to destroy or damage it (Roland Barthes described this as “murder by language”).

Three times in one day was I delivered from impending death. My attendants, who were scattered in all directions, came running back to me, calling out, "Peace! peace! you will finish all your work in spite of these people, and in spite of everything." Like them, I took it as an omen of good success to crown me yet, thanks to the "Almighty Preserver of men." We had five hours of running the gauntlet, waylaid by spearmen, who all felt that if they killed me they would be revenging the death of relations. From

The disconcertingly fecal image of Moroccans as “undifferentiated brown stuff” has a counterpart in imagery used more recently in discussions of illegal immigration from Latin America to the United States, a country alleged to be “awash under a brown tide” of Mexican immigrants (as almost a century earlier, the American anti-immigrationist Lothrop Stoddard had warned that white America was soon to be swamped by a “rising tide of color”). The significance of the expression “brown tide” may not be obvious to all readers. The term refers to an algae infestation specific to the Gulf of Mexico that turns seawater brown.

Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions (“As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away”; “Terror hunt snares twenty-five”; and “Net closes around Bin Laden”) with enemy bases as animal nests (“Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama”; “Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked”) from which the prey must be driven out (“Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out”; “America’s new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves”). We need to trap the animal (“Trap may net Taliban chief”; “FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders”) and lock it in a cage (“Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger”). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator (“Chained beast—shackled Saddam dragged to court”), or a monster (“The terrorism monster”; “Of monsters and Muslims”), while at other times he is a pesky rodent (“Americans cleared out rat’s nest in Afghanistan”; “Hussein’s rat hole”), a venomous snake (“The viper awaits”; “Former Arab power is ‘poisonous snake’”), an insect (“Iraqi forces find ‘hornet’s nest’ in Fallujah”; “Operation desert pest”; “Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark”), or even a disease organism (“Al Qaeda mutating like a virus”; “Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism”). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate (“Iraq breeding suicide killers”; “Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam”).

The evangelist must not depend on foreign support other than an occasional supply of beads and calico; coffee is indigenous, and so is sugar-cane. When detained by ulcerated feet in Manyuema I made sugar by pounding the cane in the common wooden mortar of the country, squeezing out the juice very hard and boiling it till thick; the defect it had was a latent acidity, for which I had no lime, and it soon all fermented. I saw sugar afterwards at Ujiji made in the same way, and that kept for months. Wheat and rice are cultivated by the Arabs in all this upland region; the only thing a missionary needs in order to secure an abundant supply is to follow the Arab advice as to the proper season for sowing. Pomegranates,

Seven days west of Katañga flows another Lualaba, the dividing line between Rua and Lunda or Londa; it is very large, and as the Lufira flows into Chibungo, it is probable that the Lualaba West and the Lufira form the Lake. Lualaba West and Lufira rise by fountains south of Katañga, three or four days off. Luambai and Lunga fountains are only about ten miles distant from Lualaba West and Lufira fountains: a mound rises between them, the most remarkable in Africa. Were this spot in Armenia it would serve exactly the description of the garden of Eden in Genesis, with its four rivers, the Gihon, Pison, Hiddekel, and Euphrates; as it is, it possibly gave occasion to the story told to Herodotus by the Secretary of Minerva in the City of Saïs, about two hills with conical tops, Crophi and Mophi. "Midway between them," said he, "are the fountains of the Nile, fountains which it is impossible to fathom: half the water runs northward into Egypt; half to the south towards Ethiopia.

The practice of explicitly describing others as less than humans is nowadays often frowned upon and is widely condemned. So propagandists who cultivate dehumanizing attitudes most often do this indirectly. Rather than overtly referring to a group of people as animals or monsters, they describe them in ways that invoke this image in the minds of their listeners. There are certain themes that reappear over and over in this dehumanizing discourse. The common one is criminality. The dehumanized group is made to appear inherently threatening and their criminality is represented as crudely animalistic typically involving rape and murder. Another common theme is parasitism. The dehumanized group conspires to exploit the majority sucking the blood out of decent, hard-working people and claiming privileges that they haven't earned. Images of filth and disease are also very frequent. Dehumanised groups are vectors of infection, they are dirty and contaminating. They are often thought of as invaders, outsiders who are taking us over. They are reproducing at an alarming rate and they will soon outnumber us unless we do something about it.

To dictate definition is to wield cultural power

1965. Waller, Horace. The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, from 1865 Until His Death. London, 1874. Wasserman, Jacob. Bula Matari. New York, 1933. White, Andrea. Joseph Conrad and the

When enemy is thought of as filth, war is conceived as a grand hygiene operation.

War is both intensely horrible and exquisitely pleasurable. It is horrible because of the danger and suffering that soldiers and civilians endure, and the unavoidable guilt that comes with killing. It is pleasurable because -like all pleasures- it is something that benefited our ancient ancestors who were victors in the bloddy struggle for resources.

The joy of war is the joy of the huntm of bringing down game, of ridding the world of a man-eating monster or obliterating a plague.

Our feelings of sympathy do not embrace all of humanity in equal measure. Some human beings matter to us. We care intensely about their well-being. Others do not matter very much, and still others do not matter at all. This is a hard saying, and may be difficult to accept but it is obviously and undeniably true.

Human isn’t a scientific concept at all. It’s a folk-concept that means, roughly, one of us. As Rorty insightfully observes, such people “are morally offended … by the suggestion that they treat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human.

Our relationship with killing is ambivalent, a compound of pleasure and aversion. Both are deeply rooted in human nature, and neither can be extirpated.

Among humans, members of one group may see themselves as quite distinct from members of another, and may then treat group and non-group individuals differently. Indeed, non-group members may even be “dehumanized” and regarded almost as creatures of a different species.… Chimpanzees also show differential behavior toward group and non-group members.… Moreover, some patterns of attack directed against non-group individuals have never been seen during fights between members of the same community—the twisting of limbs, the tearing off of strips of skin, the drinking of blood. The victims have thus been, to all intents and purposes, “dechimpized,” since these patterns are usually seen when a chimpanzee is trying to kill an adult prey animal—an animal of another species.73

We are innately biased against outsiders. This bias is seized upon and manipulated by indoctrination and propaganda to motivate men and women to slaughter one another. This is done by inducing men to regard their enemies as subhuman creatures, which overrides their natural, biological inhibitions against killing. So dehumanization has the specific function of unleashing aggression in war. This is a cultural process, not a biological one, but it has to ride piggyback on biological adaptations in order to be effective.

Someone is … a slave by nature if … he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it in himself. Other animals do not apprehend reason but obey their instincts. Even so there is little divergence in the way they are used. Both of them (slaves and tame animals) provide bodily assistance in supplying essential needs.… It is thus clear that, just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.

[W]arfare is by nature a form of acquisition—for the art of hunting is part of it—which is applied against wild animals and against those men who are not prepared to be ruled even though they are born for subjugation, in so far as this war is just by nature.16 In the Aristotelian scheme, barbarians are poised precariously on the cusp between humanity and subhumanity. Although a higher form of life than cattle, they are unable to reason. They are thus strangers to the civilized life of the polis, and can achieve human status only vicariously by submission to their fully human masters.

It should be clear by now that we tend to think about races along the same lines as we think about species. Both races and species are presumed to be natural kinds defined by hidden essences passed down the “bloodline” from parents to their offspring. Both are scientifically vacuous but intuitively compelling.

When chimpanzees embark on a raid, their behavior resembles a monkey hunt. They’re out for blood—but this time it’s the blood of a member of their own species. Based on chimpanzees’ alert, enthusiastic behavior, these raids are exciting events for them.… During these raids on other communities the attackers do as they do while hunting monkeys, except that the target “prey” is a member of their own species.

Raiding chimpanzees don’t eat their quarry, but they attack it with utmost ferocity. It’s not just killing—it’s overkill. Wrangham and Peterson report that “their assaults … are marked by a gratuitous cruelty—tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood—reminiscent of acts that among humans are unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war.”6

People have moral standing and inanimate objects don’t—people can be harmed, but inanimate objects can only be damaged. But where do all the other life-forms stand? Oddly enough, our judgments about this depend in large measure on where we position them on the great chain of being. This ancient, discredited, prescientific model of the cosmos still unconsciously serves as a guideline for our moral judgments.

even the most zealous vegans can weed their garden and wipe out untold millions of germs with disinfectants (“green” ones, of course) without suffering a single pang of guilt.

the closer we judge a creature is to us on the hierarchy, the more inclined we are to grant it moral standing.

But there’s something wrong with Haslam’s explanation of why this is. Think of a newborn baby. We all accept that babies are human beings. But on Haslam’s analysis this is puzzling, because babies lack the uniquely human characteristics that he lists. Neonates can’t speak or engage in higher order thought, their emotions are at best extremely crude, and they are not industrious, imaginative, or cultured. If we consider babies to be human even though they lack the traits dubbed “uniquely human,” then it simply can’t be true that anyone without these characteristics is viewed as subhuman

Olmsted inquired of the man if he found it “disagreeable” to whip the slaves. “I think nothing of it,” he drawled in response. “Why, sir, I wouldn’t mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog.”5

Roughly two thousand years prior to the invention of agriculture, nomadic tribes had begun to domesticate animals, starting with the dogs that helped them hunt game, and moving on to animals like sheep and goats, which, in a world without refrigeration, served as walking larders. With the advent of agriculture, domesticated animals became the first farm machines—the sinews of oxen and donkeys supplemented those of human laborers in the backbreaking work demanded by the new soil-based economies.

These human beasts of burden were recruited to work alongside oxen and donkeys, or, in the case of many captive women, to satisfy the victors’ sexual urges. The origin of slavery in warfare is preserved in the etymology of the word servant, which comes from the Latin servare (“save”). Servants were “saved” for forced labor instead of being summarily executed.

There are unmistakable parallels between the treatment of slaves and the treatment of domestic animals. Brown University historian Karl Jacoby points out that that virtually all of the practices deployed for controlling livestock—practices such as “whipping, chaining, branding, castration, cropping ears”—have also been used to control slaves.

the common Greek term for “slave,” andrapodon, “man-footed creature,” was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely, tetrapodon, “four-footed creature.

Because thoughts about ethnoracial groups have a deep resonance with thoughts about biological species, people’s minds naturally turn to thoughts about the latter when they want to denigrate the former. Because derogatory thoughts are the driving force, hated or despised species are unconsciously selected to represent them.

There are some truths that no one likes to hear, but it is precisely these that we need to pursue if we are to understand where war lives in human nature.

We exploit science to make war because we are warlike creatures.

The more we learn about ourselves and our history, the more we are confronted with our extraordinarily violent character.

Our brains needed to be able to do more than simply create models of the world. The power of imagination took root in the brains of our ancestors because it helped them predict uncertain futures.

Those who in principle reject an evolutionary account of collective human violence must either deny its existence -which is surely a quixotic move- or else provide an alternative hypothesis. So far, no coherent alternative has been suggested.

Faced with an impressive and rapidly developing scientific image of the human animal, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that our mental states -the thoughts that we think, the passions that move us, and the decisions that mould our lives- are consequences of physiological processes ocurring in our brains.

...it is hard for many people to abandon the concept that human beings are angels imprisoned in earthly shells.