Robert Sapolsky

Quotes

• “I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.”
• “Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.”
• “This is a classic case of what is often called physics envy, the disease among scientists where the behavioral biologists fear their discipline lacks the rigor of physiology, the physiologists wish for the techniques of the biochemists, the biochemists covet the clarity of the answers revealed by molecular biologists, all the way down the down until you get to the physicists, who confer only with God.”
• “We are a fine species with some potential. Yet we are racked by sickening amounts of violence. Unless we are hermits, we feel the threat of it, often as a daily shadow. And regardless of where we hide, should our leaders push the button, we will all be lost in a final global violence.”
• “The ones who I train to become scientists go at it like the warriors they should be, overturning existing knowledge and reigning paradigms, each discovery a murder of their scientific ancestors. And if I have trained them well, I must derive whatever satisfaction I can from the inevitability of becoming their Oedipal target someday.”
• “The notion of the psychopathology of the shaman works just as readily in understanding the roots of major Western religions as well.”

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