Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Genevieve Wheeler

Quote by Genevieve Wheeler

Work

Adelaide

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Genevieve Wheeler

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Genevieve Wheeler. more

You May Also Like

“Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism […] about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. The head rules the belly through the chest—he seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”

EducationHuman NatureHumanismMaterialismRelativism
Book:THE ABOLITION OF MAN
Create image

“The idea that human nature is perfectible, that under which modernity and the technological project is founded, is completely unbelievable now. Everyone in the sciences now agrees that human nature is fundamentally flawed and animalistic. Even all the socialists and the scientists at this point agree that half of human nature is genetic. This is indirect opposition even to what people believed 10 years ago, that all humans are equal, blank slates who are motivated by social engineering.”

PsychologySocietyHuman NatureSociologyModernity
Author:Whatifalthist
Create image

“The most important difference between men and women is that men get benefit from risk, and women don't. Men wage war, hunt, go on trading expeditions; while women are weighed down firstly by child-bearing and are also just phisically weaker. In game theory terms this creates very different incentives for men is the formation of systems in which men can excel through doing stuff to make themselves more attractive as mates. To women is to mitigate risk as much as humanly possible.”

SocietyHuman NatureMen And WomenGender Roles
Author:Whatifalthist
Create image