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Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.

— Robert Sapolsky Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)

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More quotes by Robert Sapolsky

Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)

The notion of the psychopathology of the shaman works just as readily in understanding the roots of major Western religions as well.

The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)

From the very moment of your life, culture is leaving an imprint on who you are.

The Neuroscience Behind Behavior (2017)

We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything.

Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)

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.

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

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The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman (1903)

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.

Horace Mann Thoughts Selected from the Writings of Horace Mann (1867)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Sapolsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.