Quotes from Azar Gat

Humans have far longer memories than do animals and, thus revenge -the social settling of accounts with those who offended them- assumes a wholly new level with them.

From the evolutionary perspective, revenge is retaliation that is intended either to destroy an enemy or to foster deterrence against him, as well as against third parties. This, of course, applies to non-physical and non-violent, as well as to physical and violent, action.

Indeed, want and hunger were not the only reasons for fighting. Plenty and scarcity are relative not only to the number of mouths to be fed but also to the potentially ever-expanding and insatiable range of humans needs and desires. It is as if, paradoxically, human competition increases with abundance, as well as with deficiency, taking more complex forms and expressions, widening social gaps and enhancing stratification.

The innate propensity to look for and impose structure is revealed as a prominent feature of our species both by archaeology and in extant hunter-gatherer societies.

more wealth is desired even though above a certain level it has ceased to translate into greater reproduction; with effective contraception much the same applies to sexual success; power, status, honor, and fame -connected to the above- are still hotly pursued even though their reproductive significance has become ambivalent. It is the evolution-shaped proximate mechanisms -the web of desire- that dominate human behavior, even where much of their original adaptive rationale has weakened.

No formal criterion or 'definition' should obscure the fact that the early state did not emerge full blown and in a clear-cut form. Its formation was a process rather than a one-time event, which regularly took generations and centuries to unfold.

Forms of power flow and translate into each other, or, to put it in a less reified matter, possessors of power move to expand and guard it, among other things by gaining hold and tightening their grip on the various levers of power. No effective state power can maintain control, defend its realm against outsiders, or safeguard against usurpation without a substantial underpinning of force.

Ideological fixation is the result of the ever-present tensions and conflicts between our normative wishes and interpretation of reality.

In communities in which spiritual life was permeated -as it invariably was- with supernatural beliefs, sacred cults and rituals, and the practice of magic, this was a potent force. All known hunter-gatherer societies -as with any other human society- exhibit the universal human quest for ordering and manipulating the cosmos.

Ideologies, and hence ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations, are as old as civilization itself. During most of history, ideologies were mainly religious, whereas during modern times they have taken the form often described as secular religions or religion substitutes. They have always served to legitimize socioeconomic and political orders, or have projected alternatives to them.

Revenge has probably been the most regular and prominent cause of fighting cited in anthropological accounts of pre-state societies. Violence was activated to avenge injuries to honour, property, women, and kin. If life was taken, revenge reached its peak, often leading to a vicious circle of death and counter-death.

Trophy heads served much the same social purpose for primitive warriors as medals, decorations, or marks of fallen enemy aircraft do for modern ones.

Even if some women were physically and mentally capable of participating in a warrior's group, this very rarely happened.

It has been found that so called tomboy behavior in girls correlated closely with higher levels of testosterone. On the other side, low testosterone levels in males result in unassertive and 'feminine' behavior, whereas the highest levels of testosterone to which men are exposed during adolescence result in extra aggressiveness.

Perpetration of serious violence and crime is in fact the most distinctive sex difference there is, cross-culturally.

Morality is a very real and extremely potent human postulate projected onto the world. It includes broadly shared common denominators, evolutionarily engraved in human nature by the logic and adaptive pressures of social life and social cooperation. It consists of a bundle of attitudes and precepts that serve this logic, which takes different and sometimes incommensurable forms between people and between different cultural traditions.

Theory and mythology, natural and supernatural, science and magic are dichotomies shaped by later human reasoning. In fact, all of them are rooted in the search for the underlying forces behind the phenomena and the quest to enlist them on one's side.

deadly aggression is a major, evolution-shaped, innate potential that, given the right conditions, has always been easily triggered. However, its ocurrence and prevalence are subject to wide fluctuations, depending on the prominence of these conditions.

Both the capabilities and evolutionary strategies of men and women, capabilities and strategies that were of course interconnected and mutually reinforcing, made men much more predisposed to fighting than women.

Rather than being discovered or revealed, morality is a historically developing human creation in the service of social needs.

Marx's projected emancipating socialist Kingdom of Freedom - freedom not only from coercion but from any sort of necessity- turned out to be totalitarian and among the most violently oppressive regimes ever.

As the enthusiasm for the Soviet model waned, the idealistic and dissenting energies of intellectuals and the young embraced other cult figures and myths of salvation and purification: Mao, Fidel, Che, and even Pol Pot.

Furthermore, loyalty to the point of self-sacrifice to one's kin-culture group in a life-and-death conflict with other groups was part and parcel of morality in ancestral human societies, for obvious reasons, and it is still widely regarded as a virtue. For this reason, authorized killing for one's country in war is starkly distinguished morally from unathorized killing, known as murder.