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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5630330 | I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love any one else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied, 'Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.'"5" | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 14950af | Having no coercive power, leaders are simply those who are followed--individuals who have earned the respect of their companions. Such "leaders" do not--cannot--demand anyone's obedience." | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 2ceaa1a | the deepest function of myth, which is to lend narrative order to apparently disconnected bits of information, | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 5d11cf8 | A fire is never sated by any amount of logs, nor the ocean by rivers that flow into it; death cannot be sated by all the creatures in the world, nor a fair-eyed woman by any amount of men. THE KAMA SUTRA | Christopher Ryan | ||
| f8cda7a | He said it was because Christopher was willing to share the day with Daniel, but Daniel wasn't willing to share the day with Christopher." - Nathan's Grandfather" | Catherine Ryan Hyde | ||
| ece954b | Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, coined the term meme to refer to a unit of information that can spread through a community via learning or imitation the way a favored gene is replicated through reproduction. Just | Christopher Ryan | ||
| cd79953 | There's no denying that we're a species with a sweet tooth for sex. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 833e77f | An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted. ARTHUR MILLER | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 5812c57 | In 1276, Peter of Spain was elected Pope John XXI, but he died just nine months later when the ceiling of his library suspiciously collapsed on him as he slept. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 91a7ded | Poverty is a social status. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| ace1c11 | The four million Minangkabau living in West Sumatra consider themselves to be a matriarchal society. "While we in the West glorify male dominance and competition," Sanday says, "the Minangkabau glorify their mythical Queen Mother and cooperation." She reports that "males and females relate more like partners for the common good than like competitors ruled by egocentric self-interest," and that as with bonobo social groups, women's prestige .. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| d4b8c2f | What isn't debatable is that conventional marriage is a full-blown disaster for millions of men, women, and children right now. Conventional till-death-(or infidelity, or boredom)-do-us-part marriage is a failure. Emotionally, economically, psychologically, and sexually, it just doesn't work over the long term for too many couples. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 32e924c | Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound "animalistic"? It shouldn't. The animal world is full of species that have sex only during widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more "human" than animal. Strictly reproductive, once-in-a-blue-moon sex is more ".. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| fd99bc3 | humans had less need for oversized muscles for fighting but evolved larger, more powerful testicles and, in the case of humans, a much more interesting penis. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| ed7f61c | So, is the human scrotum half-empty or half-full? | Christopher Ryan | ||
| f83b00f | In March of 1558, Andahazi tells us that Colombo proudly reported his "discovery" of the clitoris to the dean of his faculty.6 As Jonathan Margolis speculates in O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, the response was probably not what Colombo had anticipated. The professor was "arrested in his classroom within days, accused of heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft and Satanism, put on trial and imprisoned. His manuscripts were confiscated, and his.. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| f922e20 | Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a bit less certain in his gloomy assessment of human nature: "Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish."10 Maybe, but cooperation runs deep in our species too. Re.. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| e383387 | This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore--even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with all the "confident girders" behind them in the past." -- | Christopher Ryan | ||
| b7535f1 | Human beings and bonobos use eroticism for pleasure, for solidifying friendship, and for cementing a deal (recall that historically, marriage is more akin to a corporate merger than a declaration of eternal love). For these two species (and apparently only these two species), nonreproductive sex is "natural," a defining characteristic.5" | Christopher Ryan | ||
| eeb6ca3 | By projecting recent post-agricultural preoccupations with female fidelity into their vision of prehistory, many theorists have Flint-stonized their way right into a cul-de-sac. Modern man's seemingly instinctive impulse to control women's sexuality is not an intrinsic feature of human nature. It is a response to specific historical socioeconomic conditions--conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. This is key to u.. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 1f43b52 | Lo que nos enriquece no es lo que poseemos, sino aquello de lo que podemos prescindir. IMMANUEL KANT | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 4e4d641 | No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied--including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all this bloody retribution, it's hard to see how monogamy comes "naturally" to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers--even presidential legacies--for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancien.. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 6af9856 | A simple maiden in her flower Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms. | Alfred, Lord Tennyson | ||
| 24139b1 | The overwhelming consensus is that egalitarian social organization is the de-facto system for foraging societies in all environments. In fact, no other system could work for foraging societies. Compulsory sharing is simply the best way to distribute risk to everyone's benefit: participation mandatory. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly. We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropol.. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 48348c9 | We're all members of one tribe or another--bonded by culture, family, religion, class, education, employment, team affiliation, or any number of other criteria. An essential first step in discerning the cultural from the human is what mythologist Joseph Campbell called detribalization. We have to recognize the various tribes we belong to and begin extricating ourselves from the unexamined assumptions each of them mistakes for the truth. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 365c0bf | the world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 9003052 | We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 8247d39 | Clearly, the biggest loser (aside from slaves, perhaps) in the agricultural revolution was the human female, who went from occupying a central, respected role in foraging societies to becoming another possession for a man to earn and defend, along with his house, slaves, and livestock. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 9946025 | Our model might strike you as absurd, salacious, insulting, scandalous, fascinating, depressing, illuminating, or obvious. But whether or not you are comfortable with what we present here, we hope you'll keep reading. We are not advocating any particular response to the information we've put together. Frankly, we're not sure what to do with it ourselves. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 7b77b84 | Malthus concluded that poverty is as inescapable as the wind and the rain. Nobody's fault. Just the way it is. This conclusion was very popular with the wealthy and powerful, who were understandably eager to make sense of their good fortune and justify the suffering of the poor as an unavoidable fact of life. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| e58b10c | What if we didn't all grow up hearing that true love is obsessive and possessive? What if, like the Mosuo, we revered the dignity and autonomy of those we loved? What if, in other words, sex, love, and economic security were as available to us as they were to our ancestors? | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 6e96d9c | No hace falta amenazar de muerte a ninguna criatura para que obre conforme a su propia naturaleza. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| c41706e | There's an old story about the trial of a man charged with biting off another man's finger in a fight. An eyewitness took the stand. The defense attorney asked, "Did you actually see my client bite off the finger?" The witness said, "Well, no, I didn't." "Aha!" said the attorney with a smug smile. "How then can you claim he bit off the man's finger?" "Well," replied the witness, "I saw him spit it out." -- | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 14d0b4b | Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| cd8f4ce | nonreproductive sex is "natural," a defining characteristic.5 Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound "animalistic"? It shouldn't. The animal world is full of species that have sex only during widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more "human" than an.. | Christopher Ryan | ||
| 5eea407 | Lawrence Otis Graham is a sprightly gossip in the Clamorgan mode: he writes largely for white magazines and is considered something of an upstart by old-line blacks. His 1999 Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class is a cross-country social whirl of interviews and personal anecdotes. Graham chronicles our old ways, and makes sure to certify their current value with the status symbols of integration; "exclusive" and "prestigio.. | Margo Jefferson | ||
| 501e664 | Her manners had not that repose Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. | Alfred, Lord Tennyson | ||
| 4440a29 | Caucasian privilege lounged and sauntered, draped itself casually about, turned vigilant and commanding, then cunning and devious. We | Margo Jefferson | ||
| 7d58ba6 | The human psyche is pathetic," I say-I declaim-to my psychopharmacologist. "It's what we have, Miss Jefferson," he replies, "it's what we have." And what I have is what I take to my psychotherapist each week. What I have is what we make together, each supplying the material she knows best. There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself,.. | Margo Jefferson | ||
| 5b452ff | Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive. | Margo Jefferson | ||
| cad2a77 | Being agreeable' is the highest duty of any human being mingling with other people....Practicing good manners should be as natural as displaying the teeth")." | Margo Jefferson | ||
| eb8f643 | too, rolled and | Margo Jefferson | ||
| c810ed2 | Regularly denounce Caucasians, whose behavior toward us, and all dark-skinned people, proved they did not morally deserve their privilege. We | Margo Jefferson | ||
| 7f9f9fc | I've never been so sick of RACE in my life. Every group with its rights and grievances, its mathematically precise litany of what has been denied, what should have been granted long ago, what must be restored and redressed. Even everyday WASPS compete now. Because their sense of being dispossessed, displaced, bullied, has in an amazingly short time become as acute, as outraged, as righteous as that of the groups they managed and mangled for.. | Margo Jefferson |