Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Robert Sapolsky

Quote by Robert Sapolsky

“A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we've seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. Likewise with baboons - if you are low ranking, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order. It's something similar here - despite the conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor.”

Quote by Robert Sapolsky

Create image

Author

Robert Sapolsky

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Robert Sapolsky. more

You May Also Like

“Repensei no corpo em desordem da professora, no corpo desgovernado de Melina. Sem uma razão evidente, comecei a olhar com atenção para as mulheres ao longo da estrada. De repente me veio a impressão de ter vivido com uma espécie de limitação do olhar: como se só fosse capaz de focalizar nosso grupo de meninas, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, a mim mesma, minhas colegas de escola, e jamais tivesse realmente notado o corpo de Melina, o de Giuseppina Peluso, o de Nunzia Cerullo, o de Maria Carracci. O único corpo de mulher que eu tinha examinado com crescente preocupação era a figura claudicante de minha mãe, e apenas por aquela imagem me sentira perseguida, ameaçada, temendo até agora que ela se impusesse de chofre à minha própria imagem. Naquela ocasião, ao contrário, vi nitidamente as mães da família do bairro velho. Eram nervosas, eram aquiescentes. Silenciavam de lábios cerrados e ombros curvos ou gritavam insultos terríveis aos filhos que as atormentavam. Arrastavam-se magérrimas, com as faces e os olhos encavados, ou com traseiros largos, tornozelos inchados, as sacolas de compra, os meninos pequenos que se agarravam às suas saias ou queriam ser levados no colo. E, meu Deus, tinham dez, no máximo vinte anos a mais do que eu. No entanto pareciam ter perdido os atributos femininos aos quais nós, jovens, dávamos tanta importância e que púnhamos em evidência com as roupas, com a maquiagem. Tinham sido consumidas pelo corpo dos maridos, dos pais, dos irmãos, aos quais acabavam sempre se assemelhando, ou pelo cansaço ou pela chegada da velhice, pela doença. Quando essa transformação começava? Com o trabalho doméstico? Com as gestações? Com os espancamentos? Lila se deformaria como Nunzia? De seu rosto delicado despontaria Fernando, seu andar elegante se transmutaria nas passadas abertas e braços afastados do tronco, de Rino? E também meu corpo, um dia, cairia em escombros, deixando emergir não só o de minha mãe, mas ainda o do pai? E tudo o que eu estava aprendendo na escola se dissolveria, o bairro tornaria a prevalecer, as cadências, os modos, tudo se confundiria numa lama escura, Anaximandro e meu pai, Fólgore e dom Achille, as valências e os pântanos, os aoristos, Hesíodo e a vulgariadade arrogante dos Solara, como de resto há milênios acontecia na cidade, sempre mais decomposta, sempre mais degradada?”

ViolenceInequalityWomanhoodHeredityGaze
Book:The Story of a New Name
Create image

“In Nevada I could feel the Long Crisis with a terrifying intimacy, as if it was some sort of uncanny, bodily contact— like the feeling you get camped out in the swirling, galaxy-littered darkness of the open range when a reptile brushes up against your prostrate body. Except that the reptile at least shares with you some deep, serpentine connection, a lineage lost somewhere in the plummet of primeval time. The Crisis, on the other hand, is a vast creature, not contained by familiar scales of time or space. It is a social terror made of masses of machinery and animals, yet not in any way kin to these components. And what we sense of it today is merely one of its many limbs extending backward from its true body writhing somewhere just out of sight, at home in our own incomprehensible future.”

PoliticsEconomicsCrisisInequalitySociologyClass WarfareClass WarClass ConflictCosmic Horror
Book:Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict
Create image

“Everything about these times, I have to say, worries me, but that the majority of the human race - women, children, men - is subjected in various ways to the effects of inequality seems to me at the core of all the problems that consume us. Above all, inequality generates an extraordinary waste of minds and creative energies, which, if they were trained and put to use, would likely make our history an active laboratory for repairing the damage we’ve caused so far - or at least of controlling its effects, rather than an unbearable list of horrors. - from Incidental Inventions”

Inequality
Author:Elena Ferrante
Create image

“What is the people's one desire, when once it has been stung by the democratic tarantula? It is that all men should be equal, and in consequence that all inequalities natural as well as artificial should disappear. It will not have artificial inequalities, nobility of birth, royal favours, inherited wealth, and so it is ready to abolish nobility, royalty, and inheritance. Nor does it like natural inequalities, that is to say a man more intelligent, more active, more courageous, more skillful than his neighbors. It cannot destroy these inequalities, for they are natural, but it can neutralize them, strike them with impotence by excluding them from the employments under its control. Democracy is thus led quite naturally, irresistibly one may say, to exclude the competent precisely because they are competent, or if the phrase pleases better and as the popular advocate would put it, not because they are competent but because they are unequal, or, as he would probably go on to say, if he wished to excuse such action, not because they are unequal, but because being unequal they are suspected of being opponents of equality. So it all comes to the same thing. This it is that made Aristotle say that where merit is despised, there is democracy. He does not say so in so many words, but he wrote: "Where merit is not esteemed before everything else, it is not possible to have a firmly established aristocracy," and that amounts to saying that where merit is not esteemed, we enter at once on a democratic regime and never escape from it.”

DemocracyInequalityIncompetence
Book:Le culte de l'incompétence
Create image

“Solo al abrigo de aquella tapia protectora había arboles y frutas, flores, aromas, pájaros: después, todo cuanto rodeaba aquel lugar privilegiado se presentaba árido e inculto, todo tenía impreso el sello de la desolación y de la tristeza. Solo en los aristocráticos salones de aquella vivienda existían la riqueza y el lujo, el refinado gusto de la elegancia y todo lo que puede hacer soportable y aun querido un destierro. Fuera de allí, las casuchas que se hallaban diseminadas a corta distancia de aquel pequeño palacio, que parecía insultar osadamente la miseria que le rodeaba, eran de un aspecto lúgubre, llenas de pobreza y faltas de todo lo que puede hacer agradable la vida. Al mirarlas no podría menos de preguntarse uno a sí mismo si los que vivían en semejantes barracas tenían razón como nosotros, si eran hombres que pensaban y vivían y si, siendo así, no desesperaban de su suerte maldiciendo lo que todos los del universo deben maldecir.”

InequalityIrony
Book:La hija del mar
Create image