“Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it.”

“Racism is an avoidable culture clash masquerading as inescapable biological warfare.”

“Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.”

“Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow.”

“Human needs, although originally derived from biological necessity, are thus a result of the existence of society and are conditioned by the stage of development which society has reached.”

“Because it is… far slower than Lamarckian evolution, biological evolution is always quickly outrun by cultural change.”

“The expression of aggression is conditioned both biologically and culturally and it can be learned. On the other hand, proper upbringing can completely eliminate aggressive behavior, but it must be remembered that biological conditions remain present and aggression can easily be restored.”

“Independent of biological need fulfillment and the reproductive needs of the species, cultures] satisfy not bodily needs, but values. Values define cultural man's need for rationality, meaningfulness in emotional experience, richness of imagination, and depth of faith. All cultures respond to such supra-biological values. But in what form they do so depends on the specific kind of values people happen to have.”

“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”

“Life continued, the wheel turned, the earth moved, and even death—that delightful biological necessity—was an aspect of life.”