“We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.”

— Robert Wright

Source: The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Robert Wright 3

American journalist, born 1957 1957

Donald Watson (1910–2005) English vegan activist

Inaugural newsletter of the Vegan Society, Vegan News no. 1 (November 1944). Quoted in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, edited by Linda Kalof (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 30 https://books.google.it/books?id=Cdv_DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA30.

“When we build an attractive home, we raze land on which animals have already built their homes. They have nowhere to go.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

Reason, June, 1990
1990s

“To the extent that we accept this view, we effectively mistake ourselves for highly dimorphic animals such as peacocks or deer.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 153

“How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Writings on Physics and Philosophy (1994), p. 15
Context: A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, “You look very unhappy”; whereupon I answered fiercely, “How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?”.