The Murderer Next Door Quotes

“Studies that compare men’s and women’s motives for affairs invariably find that “sex,” pure and simple, is a more dominant motive for men. It doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t love their wives.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Men prize physical attractiveness more than women when looking for a mate, which is why this is one of the critical issues in competition among women, and also why one of the tactics women most frequently use to derogate their sexual rivals is public putdowns regarding a rival’s appearance.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Many of the behaviors are ordinary tactics of courtship, such as sending flowers, leaving notes, phoning, dropping by. If the overtures are welcome, it’s courtship. If they are unwelcome and elicit alarm, they qualify as stalking.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Wife beating is usually attributed to pathology, cultural values of macho men, or patriarchal societies in which men are united in their interests with other men to oppress all women. These explanations cannot be correct, for they utterly violate the logic of how evolution by selection designs men’s psychology. Men cannot be united with other men in their interests of oppression, even in principle, for the simple reason that men are primarily in competition with other men. Men do not desire to oppress all women, for they have sisters, mothers, daughters, and nieces whom they desire to protect and defend.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“The cuckold acquires a reputation as easily exploitable once it becomes known that he has been exploited. Women assume that he lacks the ability to prevent other men from encroaching. Perceptions of his desirability on the mating market plummet. All these factors add up to formidable fitness costs of being cuckolded.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Indeed, cuckolded men are universal objects of disrespect and derision.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“The average woman is able to attract a far more desirable mate for a short-term sexual encounter than for long-term love, because highly desirable men are willing to consent to sex with a woman of lower mate value as long as the liaison does not come burdened with entangling commitments.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“One might think that killing would be a great turnoff to women, but apparently that’s not the case.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Murders by acquaintances, friends, and family are much more common than murders by strangers.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Most killers, in a nutshell, are not crazy. They kill for specific reasons, such as lust, greed, envy, fear, revenge, status, and reputation, or to get rid of someone who they perceive is inflicting costs on them. They are like you. They are like me.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“The simple explanations that are so frequently proffered to explain murder—poverty, pathology, parents, media violence—fail crashingly at getting to the heart of the darkness, the underlying architecture of the murdering mind.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Despite utopian visions and wishful thinking about egalitarian values, all human societies are subject to strict, and sometimes frustrating, rules regarding status. All societies, throughout the eons of evolution, have had status hierarchies. For men, one of the great benefits of status has been its appeal to women.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“The basic truth is that men who lack status become losers in the game of mating. Other men abuse them with impunity, take their metaphorical lunch money, and poach their partners.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“In fact, the greater variability in reproductive opportunity among men holds the key to an array of critical sex differences. It explains why men are larger and stronger than women, because they’ve competed more on the basis of physical prowess. It explains why men mature sexually two years later, on average, than women—to beef up for the intensity of intrasexual competition rather than enter the fray before they are ready. It explains why men expose themselves in larger numbers to dangerous recreational sports—to display their courage. It explains why men die seven years earlier on average than women, as a cumulative consequence of dangerous competitive activities originally engaged in to show off their physical prowess. And, most important, it explains why men have evolved adaptations to carry out extreme violence in specific circumstances involved with mating competition, including murder.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Women’s reproductive success has historically been limited not by the number of mates they can accumulate but, rather, by the genetic quality of a single mate, by his ability to accrue resources, and by his willingness to funnel those resources to her and her children. All modern women have inherited these mating desires from their successful maternal ancestors.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Since men prize fidelity, women do battle with other women both to display signals of fidelity and to disparage their rivals by impugning their fidelity.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Men who were indifferent to the sexual contact that their wives might have with other men ended up raising their rival’s children more often than men who didn’t tolerate their mates’ indiscretions. So modern men have descended not from these indifferent men, but from men who strived, and succeeded more often than not, to maintain exclusive sexual control of their mates.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“Emotions, far from opposing reason, are extraordinarily effective means for implementing goals. Passions possess a functional, subconscious logic.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

“The quaint phrase “domestic violence” and its typical analysis by psychologists fail to capture the cloaked reasons why men beat up their mates. Wife beating is usually attributed to pathology, cultural values of macho men, or patriarchal societies in which men are united in their interests with other men to oppress all women. These explanations cannot be correct, for they utterly violate the logic of how evolution by selection designs men’s psychology. Men cannot be united with other men in their interests of oppression, even in principle, for the simple reason that men are primarily in competition with other men.4 Men do not desire to oppress all women, for they have sisters, mothers, daughters, and nieces whom they desire to protect and defend. Men do have adaptations to control and manipulate their own mates, and therein lies the horrifying bridge to abuse.”
― David M. Buss, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill