The Most Dangerous Animal Quotes

“Terrorism" is a word with little content - it is a label for brutalities committed by "the enemy", and from which one's own acts of destruction are exempted. It is an inchoate and emotionally laden concept, a semantic mirror of our dishonesty and a repository for everything about war that we would like to disavow. Making a sharp distinction between war and terrorism is at best a self-deceptive game.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Self-deception is an indispensable element of war, and that despite the fact that wars are calculated and planned, there is a sense in which human beings do not know what they are doing when they cut one another down on the battlefield.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“The impressive record of atrocities racked up by the human race does not suggest that our conduct is guided by sympathy for others.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“The history of humanity is, to a very great extent, a history of violence.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“To understand war, we must understand ourselves.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Like it or not, war is distinctively human. Apart from the raiding behavior of chimpanzees and the so-called wars prosecuted by certain species of ant, there is nothing in nature that comes anywhere near approximating it.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Our feelings of sympathy do not embrace all of humanity in equal measure. Some human beings matter to us. We care intensely about their well-being. Others do not matter very much, and still others do not matter at all. This is a hard saying, and may be difficult to accept but it is obviously and undeniably true.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Our relationship with killing is ambivalent, a compound of pleasure and aversion. Both are deeply rooted in human nature, and neither can be extirpated.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“The joy of war is the joy of the huntm of bringing down game, of ridding the world of a man-eating monster or obliterating a plague.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“War is both intensely horrible and exquisitely pleasurable. It is horrible because of the danger and suffering that soldiers and civilians endure, and the unavoidable guilt that comes with killing. It is pleasurable because -like all pleasures- it is something that benefited our ancient ancestors who were victors in the bloddy struggle for resources.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“When enemy is thought of as filth, war is conceived as a grand hygiene operation.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Our brains needed to be able to do more than simply create models of the world. The power of imagination took root in the brains of our ancestors because it helped them predict uncertain futures.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“The more we learn about ourselves and our history, the more we are confronted with our extraordinarily violent character.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“We exploit science to make war because we are warlike creatures.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Science is a tool, and if we were an esentially kind and peaceful species, it would not occur to us to use this tool for destructive purposes.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“From the scalped bodies of ancient warriors to the suicide bombers in today's newspaper headlines, history is drenched in human blood.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Violence has followed our species every step of the way in its long journey through time.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“...it is hard for many people to abandon the concept that human beings are angels imprisoned in earthly shells.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Faced with an impressive and rapidly developing scientific image of the human animal, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that our mental states -the thoughts that we think, the passions that move us, and the decisions that mould our lives- are consequences of physiological processes ocurring in our brains.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Those who in principle reject an evolutionary account of collective human violence must either deny its existence -which is surely a quixotic move- or else provide an alternative hypothesis. So far, no coherent alternative has been suggested.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“There are some truths that no one likes to hear, but it is precisely these that we need to pursue if we are to understand where war lives in human nature.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War