Libertarians

"[There is] ‘an open conspiracy with the Muslim League to bathe the province in blood’... ‘he (the Governor) wanted to hand over power to the Muslim League, whose followers have been indulging in the murder of innocent men, women and children.’ .... “if the Governor wants he can stop all lawlessness in the Frontier in two days, but how can he when he himself is guiding the violent and communal League movement?”"

"Pathans! Your house has fallen into ruin. Arise and rebuild it and remember to what race you belong."

"Whenever I had an opportunity to address the people in different parts of our province, I told them clearly that indeed, I was of the opinion that India should not be divided because today in India we have witnessed the result. Thousands and thousands of young and old, children, men, and women were massacred and ruined. But now that the division is an accomplished fact, the dispute is over. " I delivered many speeches against the division of India, but the question is: has anybody listened to me? You may hold any opinion about me, but I am not a man of destruction but of construction. If you study my life, you will find that I devoted it to the welfare of our country. We have proclaimed that if the Government of Pakistan would work for our people and our country the Khudai Khidmatgars would be with them. I repeat that I am not for the destruction of Pakistan. In destruction lies no good. "Neither Hindus nor Muslims, nor the Frontier, not Punjab, Bengal or Sindh stands to gain from it. There is advantage only in construction. I want to tell you categorically I will not support anybody in destruction. If any constructive programme is before you, if you want to do something constructive for our people, not in theory, but in practice, I declare before this House that I and my people are at your service... (February 1948)"

"My religion is truth, love and service to God and humanity. Every religion that has come into the world has brought the message of love and brotherhood. Those who are indifferent to the welfare of their fellowmen, whose hearts are empty of love, they do not know the meaning of religion."

"There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pathan like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence. It is not a new creed. It was followed fourteen hundred years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca."

"“It is my inmost conviction,” Badshah Khan said, “that Islam is amal, yakeen, muhabat” – selfless service, faith, and love."

"Only a dead nation remembers its heroes when they die. Real nations respect them when they are alive."

"In 1958, Ghaffar Khan wrote that he had been killed ’by those people for whom he had forsaken his own people’."

"I have one great desire."

"Better be poisoned in one's own blood then to be poisoned in one's principle."

"It seems to me that in spite of his close contact with Gandhi, Badshah Khan failed to understand the wisdom of his great leader. When Gandhi thought of the problems of the Hindus he could not do so without also thinking of the interests of the Muslims; when he thought of the problems of India, he could not forget those of the world. With Badshah Khan it is the other way round. When he thinks of the Hindus, he cannot forget that he is a Muslim - a Khudai Khidmatgar, no doubt, but a Muslim nonetheless; when he thinks of the Muslims, he cannot forget that he is a Pathan."

"Unfortunately, Muslim society in India has not yet produced its own Gandhi. Indeed, it will not be able to do so till the ground is prepared by a generation of men who subject the religion and culture of the Muslims to ruthless scrutiny in the light of modern values. Badshah Khan is a great and good Muslim, and also a follower of Gandhi. But he is no Gandhi himself. Therein lies the cause of his failure."

"My principal aim is to destroy socialism."

"Democracy means that if this man, you, and I will be trapped on an island, we having a majority of votes will decide that you have to sleep with us. That's the Democracy. And with 2/3 votes we can even put that in the constitution."

"The average intelligence quotient of Australian aborigines is more or less equal to a child with Down syndrome, and no one thinks to do abortions on Aborigines."

"A monkey is a much better voter than a socialist. Statistically speaking, if we assume that there are two options to choose from: the "A" and the "B" - the monkey is voting randomly, so its wrong 50% of the time. The socialist, however - is always wrong."

"A jump from the sixth floor is definitely more harmful than taking heroin, yet we don't forbid building sixth floors."

"I support the protection of life from conception to natural death. But a natural death for a murderer is a death on the gallows."

"When in an organism there are cancer cells, they have to be removed, not helped because they're "so young" and "so creative"."

"The difference between Europe and USA is that in USA they keep the Reds in reservations, and we in parliaments."

"The purpose of road traffic is speed, not safety."

"A scientist who writes for a grant has to write subpar papers - so that the grant giver will understand what the paper is about."

"The socialist is not a human, but an animal, because a human differs from an animal in this that he has moral values, and the Reds (socialists), as their program states, they disobey them."

"Socialists believe otherwise - a man is not competent enough to make decision should he use seatbelt, should he buy insurance, and the same man is competent enough to elect president and government."

"Socialism destroys everywhere one thing - diversity. Everything is supposed to be best, and as we know, best things are always in shortage. I remind once more that for the socialists "best" is what they consider "best" for us, and not what we like."

"The world is not ruled by those who have money, but those who have dreams"

"Saying you are a patriot is not enough - you have to be one."

"Nobody is safe of his life, property and health when the parliament deliberates."

"[Conservatism is] a fight for keeping these qualities that made us move unceasingly."

"If the car drives in the wrong direction better fuel won't help."

"Socialists try to convince us that the tea becomes sweet not because of sugar, but because of mixing."

"I am for joining a free trade zone. The European Union is not such zone, but a zone of raging bureaucracy which stears every hectolitre of wine, and every tone of beef."

"We are not for making shoes, so shoemakers can have jobs, but so we can have shoes."

"The sleep of reason encourages the elections."

"Justice is to social justice like a chair to an electric chair."

"It is the nature of the pig, that if there's nothing to stop her from stepping into abreuvoir - then it will. Nothing will stop bureaucracy from continuing to serve us "good" and protecting us from "evil" - if we'll let them do that."

"Politicians that proclaim big words without meaning rule in democracy. At best they allow themselves to discover that it's better to be rich and healthy than sick and poor and that it is necessary to care for 'good of Poland" - clap clap, hurricane of clapping."

"Fight to preserve these traits of civilization, that made us go forward."

"Currently we breed cowards and snitches. Whored society of sons of whores!"

"I suspect in Lenin's works there's everything, if you search well."

"Paleontologists do not have to search for famous "missing link" from which humans supposedly came, and current great apes. This link is simply the socialist - because he has both monkey genes."

"Every fascist state like Germany, France, or modern Poland takes away citizen's right to self-defense. Fascist Americans such as Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton want to take arms away from American society."

"Building of European Commission would be perfect for a brothel."

"Fascism is not [only] squads of the SA or the Blackshirts marching on the streets. Fascism is officials, in uniforms ordering what is capitalist supposed to do with "his" factory, and how he should father "his" children and occasionally - how many Jews (or anti-Semites) should be sent to Auschwitz."

"Before I was nine years old, I had been a socialist. When young, everyone is a socialist; later he becomes smarter."

"I've had no sexual education, but I have six children."

"Prisons are the universities of the opposition."

"Socialism is a monster that will die."

"[Women] Inferior? Superior! I am sexist, of course."

"If every other Jew had a weapon in 1939, the Holocaust might have been prevented."

"But please remember, that in 1991 in the w:Sejm [lower chamber of polish parliament] I didn't demand the abolishment of Special Economic Zones. I demanded the creation of a single Special Economic Zone - which would encompass the whole country!"

"Under Hitler or Stalin a Góral [Tatra-highlander] could choose to produce oscypek [smoked cheese] however he preferred. Nowadays the EU official is watching him."

"Let's be straight, anarchist demanding state-sponsored welfare would be akin to a Catholic demanding right to rape the Mary, mother of Jesus."

"I know of no other way that human nature can have developed except by evolution, and there is now overwhelming evidence that there is no other way for evolution to work except by competitive reproduction. Those strains that reproduce persist; those that do not reproduce die out."

"Everything can be inherited except sterility. None of your direct ancestors died childless. Consequently, if we are to understand how human nature evolved, the very core of our inquiry must be reproduction, for reproductive success is the examination that all human genes must pass if they are not to be squeezed out by natural selection. Hence I am going to argue that there are very few features of the human psyche and nature that can be understand without reference to reproduction. I begin with sexuality itself."

"Reproducing sexually must improve an individual’s reproductive success or else sex would not persist. It is increasingly hard to understand how human beings came to be so clever without considering sexual competition."

"The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design. Every living thing is “designed” quite unconsciously by the selective reproduction of its own ancestors to suit a particular life-style."

"The study of human nature must have profound implications for the study of history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and politics. Each of those disciplines is an attempt to understand human behavior, and if the underlying universals of human behavior are the product of evolution, then it is vitally important to understand what the evolutionary pressures were."

"I have gradually come to realize that almost all of social science proceeds as if 1859, the year of the publication of the Origin of Species, had never happened; it does so quite deliberately, for it insists that human culture is a product of our own free will and invention. Society is not the product of human psychology, it asserts, but vice versa. That sounds reasonable enough, and it would be splendid for those who believe in social engineering if it were true, but is is simply not true."

"We assume, and rightly that a Russian is just as human after two generations of oppressive totalitarianism as his grandfather was before him. But why, then, does social science proceed as if it were not the case, as if people’s natures are the products of their societies?"

"There is, therefore, such a thing as a universal human nature, common to all people."

"Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past."

"In behavior, as in appearance, every human individual is unique."

"It is no harder to explain than a game of cards. There are aces and kings and twos and threes in any deck of cards. A lucky player is dealt a high-scoring hand, but none of his cards is unique. Elsewhere in the room are others with the same kinds of cards in their hands. But even with just thirteen kinds of cards, every hand is different and some are spectacularly better than others. Sex is merely the dealer, generating unique hands from the same monotonous deck of genetic cards shared by the whole species."

"People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential—the healthy, the fit, and the powerful. The consequences of this fact, which goes under the name of sexual selection, are bizarre in the extreme."

"When a neo-Darwinian asks, “Why?” he is really asking “How did this come about?” He is a historian."

"One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counterinvention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow. Every hegemony comes to an end. Evolutionary history is no different."

"In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago."

"Breeding, in sexual species, consists of finding an appropriate partner and persuading it to part with a package of genes. This goal is so central to life that it has influenced the design not only of the body but of the psyche. Simply put, anything that increases reproductive success will spread at the expense of anything that does not—even if it threatens survival."

"The more competitive nature of men is a consequence of sexual selection. Men have evolved to live dangerously because success in competition or battle used to lead to more or better sexual conquests and more surviving children. Women who live dangerously merely put at risk those children they already have. Likewise, the intimate connection between female beauty and female reproductive potential (beautiful women are almost by definition young and healthy; compared with older women, they are therefore both more fertile and have a longer reproductive life ahead of them) is a consequence of sexual selection acting on both men’s psyches and women’s bodies. Each sex shapes the other. Women have hourglass-shaped bodies because men have preferred them that way. Men have an aggressive nature because women have preferred them that way (or have allowed aggressive men to defeat other men in contests over women—it amounts to the same thing)."

"Below the surface of every banality and cliché there lies irony, cynicism, and profundity."

"I asked John Maynard Smith, one of the first people to pose the question “Why sex?,” whether he still thought some new explanation was needed. “No. We have the answers. We cannot agree on them, that is all.”"

"Sex is recombination plus outcrossing; their mixing of genes is its principal feature….So sex equals genetic mixing."

"Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes make’s an animal’s descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not “evolving.”"

"Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem."

"Psychologists sometimes wonder why people are endowed with the ability to learn the part of Hamlet or understand calculus when neither skill was of much use to mankind in the primitive conditions where his intellect was shaped. Einstein would probably have been as hopeless as anybody in working out how to catch a woolly rhinoceros. Nicholas Humphrey, a Cambridge psychologist, was the first to see clearly the solution to this puzzle. We use our intellects not to solve practical problems, but to outwit each other. Deceiving people, detecting deceit, understanding people’s motives, manipulating people—these are what the intellect is used for. So what matters is not how clever and crafty you are, but how much cleverer and craftier than other people. The value of intellect is infinite. Selection within the species is always going to be more important than selection between the species."

"But as we shall see, the appearance is misleading. Animal altruism is a myth. Even in the most spectacular cases of selflessness it turns out that animals are serving the selfies interests of their own genes—if sometimes being careless with their bodies."

"The things that kill animals or prevent them from reproducing are only rarely physical factors. Far more often other creatures are involved—parasites, predators, and competitors."

"Parasites provide exactly the incentive to change genes every generation that sex seems to demand. The success of the genes that defended you so well in the last generation may be the best of reasons to abandon the same gene combinations in the next. By the time the next generation comes around, the parasites will have surely evolved an answer to the defense that worked best in the last generation. It is a bit like sport. In chess or in football, the tactic that proves most effective is soon the one that people learn easily to block. Every innovation in attack is soon countered by another in defense."

"Computer viruses have since become a worldwide problem. It begins to look as if parasites are inevitable in any system of life."

"He (Thomas Ray) had discovered that the notion of a host-parasite arms race is one of the most basic and unavoidable consequences of evolution."

"The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasites."

"Parasites invent new keys; hosts change the locks. There is an obvious group-selectionist argument here for sex: At any one time a sexual species will have lots of different locks; members of an asexual one will all have the same locks. So the parasite with the right key will quickly exterminate the asexual species but not the sexual one. Hence the well-known fact: By turning our fields over to monocultures of increasingly inbred strains of wheat and maize, we are inviting the very epidemics of disease that can only be fought by the pesticides we are forced to use in ever larger quantities."

"Sex keeps the parasite guessing."

"A gene is by definition the descendant of a gene that was good at getting into future generations."

"Wherever you look in the historical record, the elites favored sons more than other classes….Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred even today."

"The process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective."

"The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates."

"In species where the females get nothing useful from their mates, they seem to choose on aesthetic criteria alone."

"Sexual selection theory suggests that much of the behavior and some of the appearance of an animal is adapted not to help it survive but to help it to acquire the best or the most mates."

"Females choose; their choosiness is inherited; they prefer exaggerated ornaments; exaggerated ornaments are a burden to males. That much is now uncontroversial. Thus far Darwin was right."

"It is hardly surprising to find that the males best at seduction tend to be the best at other things as well; it does not prove that females are seeking good genes for their offspring."

"Advertising works. Brand names are better known if they are advertised with sexy or alluring pictures, and better-known brands sell better. Why does it work? Because the price the consumer would have to pay in ignoring the subliminal message is just too high. It is better to be fooled into buying the second-best ice cream than go to the bother of educating yourself to resist the salesmanship."

"As every bird-watcher knows, the beauty of a bird’s song is inversely correlated with the colorfulness of its plumage."

"Such “habituation” is just a property of the way brains work; our senses, and those of grackles, notice novelty and change, not steady states. The female preference did not evolve: it just is that way."

"If females have an existing aesthetic preference, it is only logical that males will evolve to exploit that preference."

"Human beings are a product of evolution as much as any slime mold, and the revolution of the last two decades in the way scientists now think about evolution has immense implications for mankind as will. To summarize the argument so far, evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the fittest; every creature on earth is the product of a series of historical battles between parasites and hosts, between genes and other genes, between members of the same species, between members of one gender in competitions for members of the other gender. Those battles include psychological ones, to manipulate and exploit other members of the species; they are never won, for success in one generation only ensures that the foes of the next generation are fitter to fight harder. Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race."

"There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature. To say otherwise is like saying that the area of a field is determined by its length but not its width. Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience."

"The fifth method (that is, of analyzing human mating systems) is to compare mankind with other animals that share our highly social habits: with colonial birds, monkeys, and dolphins. As we shall see, the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery."

"Humanity shares this profile of ardent, polygamist males and coy, faithful females with about 99 percent of all animal species, including our closest relatives, the apes."

"And in the matter of seduction itself, once more it is the male who is expected to make the first move. Women may flirt, but men pounce."

"Women cannot increase their fecundity by taking more mates; men can."

"In any case, no moral conclusions of any kind can be drawn from evolution."

"I am trying to describe the nature of humans, not prescribe their morality. That something is natural does not make it right."

"Nature is not inflexible but malleable. Moreover, the most natural thing of all about evolution is that some natures will be pitted against others. Evolution does not lead to Utopia. It leads to a land in which what is best for a man may be the worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be the worst for a man."

"And even where I am wrong about human nature, I am not wrong that there is such a nature to be sought."

"The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savanna, but the human ones are not."

"Power seeking is characteristic of all social mammals."

"If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause and rewarding of violence."

"Monogamy, enforced by law, religion, or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men."

"One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence."

"By describing adultery as a force that shaped our mating system, I am not “justifying” it. Nothing is more “natural” than people evolving the tendency to object to being cuckolded or cheated on, so if my analysis were to be interpreted as justifying adultery, it would be even more obviously interpreted as justifying the social and legal mechanisms for discouraging adultery. What I am claiming is that adultery and its disapproval are both “natural.”"

"Jealousy is a “human universal,” and no culture lacks it, Despite the best efforts of anthropologists to find a society with no jealousy and so prove that it is an emotion introduced by pernicious social pressure or pathology, sexual jealousy seems to be an unavoidable part of being a human being."

"Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity….Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes. Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history."

"Men and women have different bodies. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family. Men and women have different minds. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family. The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory. The proposition that men and women have evolved different minds is anathema to every social scientist and politically correct individual. Yet I believe it to be true for two reasons. First, the logic is impeccable….Second, the evidence is overwhelming."

"These concerns (that is, about differences being used to justify unequal treatment) are fair. But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not inequality."

"We give boys tractors and girls dolls. We are reinforcing the stereotypical obsessions that they already have, but we are not creating them. This is something every parent knows. Despairingly they watch their son turns every stick into a sword or gun, while their daughter cuddles even the most inanimate object as if it were a doll."

"These facts have been first disputed and then actively suppressed by the educational establishment, which continues to insist that there are no differences in learning ability between boys and girls."

"There is a contradiction at the heart of feminism, one that few feminists have acknowledged. You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally capable of all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women, they would be done differently."

"Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not."

"Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women."

"Anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity."

"The stuff of anthropology—the traditions, the myths, the crafts, the language, the rituals—is to me but the froth on the surface. Beneath lie giant themes of humanity that are the same everywhere and that are characteristically male and female. To a Martian an anthropologist studying the differences between races would seem like a farmer studying the differences between each of the wheat plants in his field. The Martian is much more interested in the typical wheat plant. It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing."

"Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favor to either sex."

"Beauty is not arbitrary."

"Morality is never based upon nature."

"In the 1970s a few brave “sociobiologists” began to ask why, if other animals had evolved natures, humans would be exempt. They were vilified by the social science establishment and told to go back to ant-watching. Yet the question they had asked has not gone away. The principal reason for the hostility to sociobiology was that it seem to justify prejudice. This was simply a confusion. Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of ism, have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed because one believes in universals and the other in racial or class particulars."

"Sexual selection, as we have seen, is very different from natural selection in its effects, for it does not solve survival problems, it makes them worse."

"And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective on the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different."

"The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious."

"I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge."

"There are genes that have not changed much since the very first single-celled creatures populated the primeval ooze. There are genes that were developed when our ancestors were worm-like. There are genes that must have first appeared when our ancestors were fish. There are genes that exist in their present form only because of recent epidemics of disease. And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred."

"If I read the genome out to you at the rate of one word per second for eight hours a day, it would take me a century. If I wrote out the human genome, one letter per millimetre, my text would be as long as the River Danube. This is a gigantic document, an immense book, a recipe of extravagant length, and it all fits inside the microscopic nucleus of a tiny cell that fits easily upon the head of a pin."

"Almost everything in the body, from hair to hormones, is either made of proteins or made by them."

"Human beings accumulate about one hundred mutations per generation."

"All rules have exceptions (including this one)."

"Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate, and the ability to create order."

"That life is chemistry is true but boring, like saying that football is physics."

"Life consists of the interplay of two kinds of chemicals: proteins and DNA."

"This means—and religious people might find this a useful argument—that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different planet and seeded here by spacecraft, or there might even have been thousands of kinds of life at first, but only Luca survived in the ruthless free-for-all of the primeval soup. But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not know what we now know: that all life is one; seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives. The unity of life is an empirical fact. Erasmus Darwin was outrageously close to the mark: ‘One and the same kind of living filaments has been the cause of all organic life.’"

"The pope notwithstanding, the human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress."

"Human beings are of course unique. They have, perched between their ears, the most complicated biological machine on the planet. But complexity is not everything, and it is not the goal of evolution. Every species on the planet is unique. Uniqueness is a commodity in oversupply."

"There is no bone in the chimpanzee body that I do not share. There is no known chemical in the chimpanzee brain that cannot be found in the human brain. There is no known part of the immune system, the digestive system, the vascular system, the lymph system or the nervous system that we have and chimpanzees do not, or vice versa."

"It was this division of labour among specialists, unique to our species, that was the key to our ecological success, because it allowed the growth of technology."

"In other words, a record of our past is etched into our genes."

"Genes are recipes for both anatomy and behaviour."

"A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium."

"No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-gazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gipsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right. We are dealing here with a prophecy of terrifying, cruel and inflexible truth."

"No study of the causes of intelligence has failed to find a substantial heritability."

"But the astonishing result (of IQ testing) is the correlation between the scores of adopted children reared together: zero. Being in the same family has no discernible effect on IQ at all."

"As you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others. You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies, rather than adjusting your innate tendencies to the environments you find yourself in. This proves two vital things: that genetic influences are not frozen at conception and that environmental influences are not inexorably cumulative. Heritability does not mean immutability."

"In egalitarian societies, genes matter more."

"Nobody doubts that genes can shape anatomy. The idea that they also shape behaviour takes a lot more swallowing."

"No matter that the social sciences set about reinventing much more alarming forms of determinism to take the place of the genetic form: the parental determinism of Freud; the socio-economic determinism of Marx; the political determinism of Lenin; the peer-pressure cultural determinism of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead; the stimulus-response determinism of John Watson and B. F. Skinner; the linguistic determinism of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. In one of the great diversions of all time, for nearly a century social scientists managed to persuade thinkers of many kinds that biological causality was determinism while environmental causality preserved free will; and that animals had instincts, but human beings did not."

"The conclusions of both behaviour genetics and evolutionary psychology remain distinctly unpalatable to many non-scientists, whose main objection is a superficially reasonable argument from incredulity. How can a gene, a stretch of DNA ‘letters’, cause a behaviour? What conceivable mechanism could link a recipe for a protein with an ability to learn the rule for making the past tense in English? I admit that this seems at first sight a mighty leap, requiring more faith than reason. But it need not be, because the genetics of behaviour is, at root, no different from the genetics of embryonic development…The idea of genes for behaviour is no more strange than the idea of genes for development. Both are mind-boggling, but nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods."

"If you still thought evolution was about the good of the species, stop thinking so right now."

"Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the ability to resist seduction by a man was good for X chromosomes in the past."

"The genome is littered, one might almost say clogged, with the equivalent of computer viruses, selfish, parasitic stretches of letters which exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated. We are full of digital chain letters and warnings about marmalade."

"Genes do indeed behave as if they have selfish goals, not consciously, but retrospectively: genes that behave in this way thrive and genes that don’t don’t."

"Judges were never very good at science."

"The main purpose of most genes in the human genome is regulating the expression of other genes in the genome."

"It underscores yet again the fact that what we call personality is to a considerable degree a question of brain chemistry."

"The evolutionary implication is that we are descended from a common ancestor with flies which used the same way of defining the pattern of the embryo more than 530 million years ago, and that the mechanism was so good that all this dead creature’s descendants have hung on to it."

"What is true of mice is just as true of people. Flies and people are just variations on a theme of how to build a body that was laid down in some worm-like creature in the Cambrian period. They still retain the same genes doing the same job. Of course, there are differences; if there are not, we would look like flies. But the differences are surprisingly subtle."

"These two processes—linguistic philology and genetic phylogeny—are converging upon a common theme: the history of human migrations."

"This led to a neat generalization, which is so tidy it ought to be true and probably would be if physicists ran the world: every animal has roughly the same number of heartbeats per lifetime. An elephant lives longer than a mouse, but its pulse rate is so much slower that, measured in heartbeats, they both live lives of the same length."

"Natural selection has designed all parts of our bodies to last just long enough to see our children into independence, no more."

"The question is not whether nurture has a role to play, because nobody of any sense has ever gone on record as denying that it does, but whether nature has a role to play at all. When my one-year-old daughter discovered a plastic baby in a toy pram one day while I was writing this chapter, she let out the kinds of delighted squeals that her brother had reserved at the same age for passing tractors. Like many parents, I found it hard to believe that this was purely because of some unconscious social conditioning that we had imposed. Boys and girls have systematically different interests from the very beginning of autonomous behaviour."

"Held up as a proof of socially constructed gender roles, he proved the exact opposite: that nature does play a role in gender. The evidence from zoology has always pointed that way: male behaviour is systemically different from female behaviour in most species and the difference has an innate component. The brain is an organ with innate gender. The evidence from the genome, from imprinted genes and genes for sex-linked behaviours, now points to the same conclusion."

"The subject of learning lies in the provinces of neuroscience and psychology. It is the opposite of instinct. Instinct is generically-determined behaviour; learning is behaviour modified by experience."

"Just as we underestimate the degree to which human brains rely upon instincts, so we have generally underestimated the degree to which other animals are capable of learning."

"I have a hard time imagining how my memory of the meaning of the word ‘volado’ consists of some strengthened synaptic connections between a few neurons. It is distinctly mind-boggling. Yet far from having removed the mystery from the problem by reducing it to the molecular level, I feel that scientists have opened before me a new and intriguing mystery, the mystery of trying to imagine how connections between nerve cells not only provide the mechanism of memory but are memory. It is every bit as thrilling a mystery as quantum physics, and a great deal more thrilling than Ouija boards and flying saucers."

"The story of p53 and the oncogenes, like much of my book, challenges the argument that genetic research is necessarily dangerous and should be curtailed. The story also strongly challenges the view that ‘reductionist’ science, which takes systems apart to understand them, is flawed and futile. Oncology, the medical study of whole cancers, diligent, brilliant and massively endowed though it was, achieved terribly little in comparison with what has already been achieved in a few years by a reductionist, genetic approach."

"The politicisation of the issue has had absurd results."

"The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view."

"A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him—the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed."

"At its birth eugenics was not a politicised science; it was a science-ised political creed."

"In Sigmund Freud’s psychology, John Watson’s behaviourism and Margaret Mead’s anthropology, nurture-determinism by parents was never tested, only assumed. Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents."

"Culture is transmitted autonomously from each children’s peer group to the next and not from parent to child—which is why, for example, the move towards greater adult sexual equality has had zero effect on willing sexual segregation in the playground. As every parent knows, children prefer to imitate peers than parents. Psychology, like sociology and anthropology, has been dominated by those with a strong antipathy to genetic explanations; it can no longer sustain such ignorance."

"So there is no escape from determinism by appealing to socialization. Either effects have causes or they do not. If I’m timid because of something that happened to me when I was young, that event is no less deterministic than a gene for timidity. The greater mistake is not to equate determinism with genes, but to mistake determinism for inevitability."

"Determinism looks backwards to the causes of the present state, not forward to the consequences."

"Yet the myth persists that genetic determinism is a more implacable kind of fate than social determinism."

"Full responsibility for one’s actions is a necessary fiction without which the law would flounder, but it is a fiction all the same. To the extent that you act in character you are responsible for your actions; yet acting in character is merely expressing the many determinisms that caused your character."

"This interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined."

"Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism, not somebody else’s. It is not the determinism that makes a difference, but the ownership. If freedom is what we prefer, then it is preferable to be determined by forces that originate in ourselves and not in others."

"Rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialise honestly for the betterment of all. So this is not a book of unthinking praise or condemnation of all markets, but it is an inquiry into how the market process of exchange and specialisation is older and fairer than many think and gives a vast reason for optimism about the future of the human race. Above all, it is a book about the benefits of change. I find that my disagreement is mostly with reactionaries of all political colours: blue ones who dislike cultural change, red ones who dislike economic change and green ones who dislike technological change."

"Many of the most profound truths come not in shouting and scandal but, rather, in a whisper. In our noisy world, they are easily missed or dismissed."

"People often have trouble finding lasting satisfaction from worldly rewards, because as soon as we acquire something, our desire resets and we are looking to the next reward."

"We wanna be like Status Quo and go on forever. Chuck Berry never changed. Little Richard never changed. I’d rather be like that and stick to a formula we’re happy with."

"You can’t keep guys faithful. If people want to get married and then run around, I think that’s dishonest. If you’re going to get married, get fucking married and that’s it. I never saw a chick that could stop me looking at all the others, so I didn’t."

"If you can give the kids a good time then that’s all it’s for. Forget art and all that – that’s bullshit. If you can send that shiver down a kid’s back then that’s what it’s all about. All else is bullshit."

"You can't have everything, can you? Where would you put it?"

"(when asked if he has any regrets) None. Life's too short."

"In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal. In your forties, you just pray it doesn’t hurt too much, and by the time you reach my age, you become convinced that, well, it could be just around the corner."

"Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people."

"Motörhead is nothing if not democratic, but I don't think it's fair to be waving your dick around when people are minding their own business and might not want to see it."

"As the decades passed, everyone knew Lemmy from Motorhead wouldn’t really live forever. It was inevitable that the legendary rocker’s hedonistic lifestyle would catch up with him. It seemed more and more imminent as his health problem affected the touring schedule of the band especially in the last few years of his life. However, we had all hoped he would at least outlive Keith Richards. Though many might argue it was sad to see the mighty Lemmy in such a frail state towards the end of his life, the contrary can also be said. How amazing was it that a man in his late 60s lived to his last months literally partying, meeting women all over the world, gambling and playing rock music to tons of fans? Lemmy lived his life as his own, to his last days, and never regretted a thing. He was lucky in the sense that most people would have dropped dead 20 years before him with the amount of meth cigarettes and Jack Daniels he consumed. But the point was that Lemmy was a bad motherfucker till the end. He was one of rock’s most respected party animals and talented bass players. Motorhead will without a doubt continue to inspire generations of rockers to come, ensuring that Lemmy’s musical legacy will never die."

"The state does not create wealth; the state destroys it. The state can give you nothing because it produces nothing, and when it attempts it, it does so poorly."

"If printing money would end poverty, printing diplomas would end stupidity."

"My contempt for the state is infinite."

"“Speech of Argentina’s President Javier Milei at Davos – Transcript” Eurasiareview"

"Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty"

"Thirty five years after we adopted the model of freedom, back in 1860, we became a leading world power. And when we embraced collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished, and we dropped to spot number 140 globally."

"If we look at the history of economic progress, we can see how between the year zero and the year 1800 approximately, world per capita GDP practically remained constant throughout the whole reference period."

"We should remember that by the year 1800, about 95% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. And that figure dropped to 5% by the year 2020, prior to the pandemic. The conclusion is obvious."

"Far from being the cause of our problems, free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty and extreme poverty across our planet. The empirical evidence is unquestionable."

"If the goods or services offered by a business are not wanted, the business will fail unless it adapts to what the market is demanding. They will do well and produce more if they make a good quality product at an attractive price. So the market is a discovery process in which the capitalists will find the right path as they move forward."

"But if the state punishes capitalists when they’re successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives, and the consequence is that they will produce less."

"The pie will be smaller, and this will harm society as a whole. Collectivism, by inhibiting these discovery processes and hindering the appropriation of discoveries, ends up binding the hands of entrepreneurs and prevents them from offering better goods and services at a better price."

"Countries that have more freedom are 12 times richer than those that are repressed. The lowest percentile in free countries is better off than 90% of the population in repressed countries. Poverty is 25 times lower and extreme poverty is 50 times lower. And citizens in free countries live 25% longer than citizens in repressed countries."

"Now what is it that we mean when we talk about libertarianism? And let me quote the words of the greatest authority on freedom in Argentina, Professor Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr, who says that libertarianism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression, in defence of the right to life, liberty and property."

"In other words, capitalist successful business people are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately, a successful entrepreneur is a hero."

"It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it’s been tried out. It’s been a failure economically, socially, culturally and it also murdered over 100 million human beings."

"The market is not a mere graph describing a curve of supply and demand. The market is a mechanism for social cooperation, where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures."

"If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be market failure is if there is coercion and the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence."

"However, faced with the theoretical demonstration that state intervention is harmful – and the empirical evidence that it has failed couldn’t have been otherwise – the solution proposed by collectivists is not greater freedom but rather greater regulation, which creates a downward spiral of regulations until we are all poorer and our lives depend on a bureaucrat sitting in a luxury office."

"Libertarianism already provides for equality of the sexes. The cornerstone of our creed is that all humans are created equal and that we all have the same inalienable rights granted by the Creator, including life, freedom and ownership."

"Unfortunately, these harmful ideas have taken a stronghold in our society. Neo-Marxists have managed to co-opt the common sense of the Western world, and this they have achieved by appropriating the media, culture, universities and also international organisations."

"Fortunately there’s more and more of us who are daring to make our voices heard, because we see that if we don’t truly and decisively fight against these ideas, the only possible fate is for us to have increasing levels of state regulation, socialism, poverty and less freedom, and therefore, worse standards of living."

"We have come here today to invite the Western world to get back on the path to prosperity. Economic freedom, limited government and unlimited respect for private property are essential elements for economic growth. The impoverishment produced by collectivism is not a fantasy, nor is it an inescapable fate. It’s a reality that we Argentines know very well."

"The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be, how much you may have in terms of natural resources, how skilled your population may be, how educated, or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank – if measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of gdps, competition, price systems, trade and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty."

"You are wrong, Milei [...] you who were put in Argentina to destroy the rule of law, to destroy the State, to destroy all social and labour rights, to destroy the national economy and to colonise Argentina and deliver it to the knees of North American imperialism."

"Government of the busy by the bossy for the bully."