“Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.”

— William Saroyan

"Locomotive 38, the Ojibway" (1940)

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William Saroyan 190

American writer 1908–1981

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“Man is born egotistical, a result of the conditioning of nature. Nature fills us with instincts; it is education that fills us with virtues.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

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Context: Man is born egotistical, a result of the conditioning of nature. Nature fills us with instincts; it is education that fills us with virtues. Nature makes us do things instinctively; one of these is the instinct for survival which can lead to infamy, while on the other side, our conscience can lead us to great acts of heroism. It doesn’t matter what each one of us is like, how different we are from each other, but when we unite we become one.
It is amazing that in spite of the differences between human beings, they can become as one in a single instant or they can be millions, and they can be a million strong just through their ideas. Nobody followed the Revolution as a cult to anyone or because they felt personal sympathy with any one person. It is only by embracing certain values and ideas that an entire people can develop the same willingness to make sacrifices of any one of those who loyally and sincerely try to lead them toward their destiny.

“Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.”

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“All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears - of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, of speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required".”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

“Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

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Context: Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.

“There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.”

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Source: Jaws

“Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.”

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Source: The Silence of the Lambs

“When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America you get a front row seat.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Archive of American Television http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/george-carlin, from one of Carlin's final interviews (2008)
Interviews, Television Appearances
Context: You know what, I said it this way: when you're born in this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat. And some of us get to sit there with notebooks. And I'm a notebook kind of guy: [pretends to be taking notes] "Oh, my God, did you see that? Did you see what he just did?..." And I watch the freak show, and I kept my notes, and I make up stuff about it, and I talk about the freaks. And the freaks are all humans, and they are all like me, and we are all the same. I'm not better, I'm not different, I'm just apart now. I'm separate, I'm over here, because I put myself out of the mix. I don't have a stake at the outcome. I'm not a cheerleader for a given outcome now.

“Men are not ‘born entitled to equal right! It would be far nearer the truth to say, ‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them’—and the riding does them good.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 179

“Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.”

Jack London Index:London - White Fang, 1906.djvu

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“There can be no doubt that our innate moral emotions and instincts were acquired in the hundreds of thousand years—probably half a million years—in which Homo sapiens lived in small hunting and gathering groups and developed a physiological constitution which governed his innate instincts. These instincts are still very strong in us. Yet civilization developed by our gradually learning cultural rules which were transmitted by teaching and which served largely to restrain and suppress some of those natural instincts.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "Science and Socialism"

“Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.”

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William Saroyan 190

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