Top 40 Sapolsky Quotes
#1. We "activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies," Sapolsky writes, "but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.
Paul Tough
#2. The bereaved had never any doubt about their dear ones' wishes and those wishes usually squared with their own inclinations.
Agatha Christie
#3. Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale,
Robert M. Sapolsky
#5. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of just this once.
Clayton M Christensen
#6. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#7. Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side
Robert M. Sapolsky
#8. Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#9. Being healthy consists of having the same disease as everyone else.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#11. Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#12. Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it. You cannot psychologically reframe your experience and decide you did not like the shirt, here's an excuse to throw it out - that sort of thing.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#13. Taking another life, she had whispered, even a guilty one, should never be easy. If it were, we'd be little more than animals.
Mary E. Pearson
#14. Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#15. I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#16. We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#17. How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#18. Cold prayers shall never have any warm answers. God will suit His returns to our requests. Lifeless, services shall have lifeless answers. When men are dull, God will be dumb.
Thomas Brooks
#19. I think there's a huge lack of political artists in America, and I think it really speaks to our consumeristic culture and how people are driven to be financially successful here. It's such a shame that we don't have people who are more inspired than that.
Corin Tucker
#20. On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#22. Digestion is quickly shut down during stress ... The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#23. If you can follow only one bit of data, follow the earnings - assuming the company in question has earnings. I subscribe to the crusty notion that sooner or later earnings make or break an investment in equities. What the stock price does today, tomorrow, or next week is only a distraction.
Peter Lynch
#24. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#25. I want you to feel what I'm feeling, Bianca. I want you to feel this uncontrollable need. I can't stand the thought that you're indifferent to me.
R.K. Lilley
#26. Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This
Robert M. Sapolsky
#27. We're getting along so well; I trust you so much for this one second that I'm going to let you yank on me.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#28. Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors - normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes us us.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#29. Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#30. Digital innovation is a dynamic storybook that has intricate chapters, with a serendipitous cover, which can be flipped over to the next level, but it is a book that never ends.
Pearl Zhu
#31. If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#32. Stress is not a state of mind ... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#33. Any teacher in the arts and sciences has to maintain a sense of childlikeness to be truly inventive.
Chris Raschka
#34. I have tried to make sure I knew the law and what the most recent changes were, and I've applied the law to the facts. I have not lost sleep over the decisions I have made.
Steven Pacey
#35. The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#36. If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing?
Malcolm Gladwell
#37. Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners are exceptions to this.)
Robert M. Sapolsky
#38. I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.
Robert M. Sapolsky
#39. I grew up in the 80s in England: we'd wake up each morning and look out the window to see if the government had finally put Daleks on the streets.
Warren Ellis
#40. A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress-related diseases are disorders of excessive stress-responses.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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