“I am not […] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time. […] [T]he center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.”

— Stephen Jay Gould , book Eight Little Piggies

"Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", p. 282
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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