Quotes from Robert Wright

By adolescence, if not earlier, people are getting feedback about their market value, feedback that shapes their self-esteem and thus affects how high they aim their sights.

To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we're naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.

When we decide to do something, we decide on the basis of a feeling.

La percepción es un proceso activo que constantemente está construyendo modelos del mundo. Esa es una de las razones por las que cada persona ve cosas diferentes en los manchones abstractos de tinta utilizados en las pruebas de Rorschach: nuestra mente trata de convertir incluso los patrones más ambiguos en algo que tenga sentido. Nos gusta tener una historia sobre lo que son y lo que significan las cosas.

the line between society and organism is unclear.

An interesting question these psychologists tend not to ask is why the muscle metaphor is apt. In other words, why is it that early successes at self-discipline lead to more successes, whereas early lapses lead to more lapses? If self-discipline is really good for the organism, you wouldn't expect natural selection to make it so easy for a few early lapses to destroy self-discipline. Yet there's no denying that a few injections of heroin can be the end of a productive life. Why?

This planet is full of people operating on the premise that their interests trump the interests of pretty much everyone else on the planet.

I consider myself an average man except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.

Almost all of the cells in the human body are sterile. Only the sex cells—our "queen bees"—get to make copies of themselves for posterity. That the zillions of sterile cells act as if they were perfectly content with this arrangement is doubtless grounded in the fact that the r between them and the sex cells is 1;

What is best in Freud is his sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings—having to reach our animal goals via a tortuous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraint. From this insight flows Freud's most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.

Few women would prefer an unemployed and rudderless man to an ambitious and successful one, all other things being even roughly equal; and few men would choose an obese, unattractive, and dull woman over a shapely, beautiful, sharp one.

The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.

I" act differently when in different "moods

What's fundamental to the Buddha's teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best.

Maybe it shouldn't surprise us that Buddhism, with all its early austerity, was founded by a man who, as a member of the ruling class, could presumably indulge his appetites fully.

For a species low in male parental investment, the basic dynamic of courtship, as we've seen, is pretty simple: the male really wants sex; the female isn't so sure.7

Bloom relates the story of Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering learning that a painting he owned, which he'd thought was a genuine Vermeer, was in fact a forgery. At that moment, according to one observer, Goering looked "as if for the first time he [had] discovered there was evil in the world.

liberation from the craving to capture pleasant feelings and escape unpleasant feelings, liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.

The chances of a small country on Assyria's periphery in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE not hosting a single shrine to an Assyrian god are about the same as the chances of a small modern country in America's sphere of influence having no McDonald's and no Starbucks. 96 (And the chances of no Israelites resenting those shrines are roughly the chances of no one resenting the cultural intrusion of a globally hegemonic America.) On

Entonces, la idea es que todo lo significativo que vemos en el mundo es algo que nosotros sobreimponemos en él?». «Exactamente»

If you don't feed a stray cat, it quits coming to your door.

Brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system.

from natural selection's point of view, feelings would make great labels for thoughts, labels that say things like "high priority," "medium priority," "low priority.

I don't have a hostile disposition toward humankind per se. In fact, I feel quite warmly toward humankind. It's individual humans I have trouble with.