Robert Sapolsky Quotes

Robert Sapolsky

Profession : Scientist

Birth : April 6, 1957

Depression is incredibly pervasive and thus important to talk about.

Robert Sapolsky

My adolescent rebellions took the form of, if anything, passive aggressively doing what was asked of me but doing it ten times more than what was asked of me, so that eventually they'd have to beg me to stop.

Robert Sapolsky

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

Robert Sapolsky

When you've wised up enough, there is a very clear conclusion that you have to reach after a while, which is, at the end of the day, it is really impossible for one person to make a difference.

Robert Sapolsky

Is stress always bad? No - if a stressor isn't too extreme, is only transient, and occurs in what overall feels like a benevolent environment, it's great, we love it - that's what play and stimulation are.

Robert Sapolsky

I was not especially a writer back in college.

Robert Sapolsky

Well, when I was a teenager I was terribly bookish. I was very studious.

Robert Sapolsky

It's insanely difficult for people to accept the extent to which we are biological organisms without agency.

Robert Sapolsky

You know, I'm an egg-heady scientist with a large beard and like Birkenstocks.

Robert Sapolsky

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

Robert Sapolsky

Of necessity, a scientist typically studies one incredibly tiny sliver of some biological system, totally ensconced within one discipline, because even figuring out how one sliver works is really hard.

Robert Sapolsky

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.

Robert Sapolsky

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.

Robert Sapolsky

As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.

Robert Sapolsky

My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.

Robert Sapolsky

For an architect's son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.

Robert Sapolsky

Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.

Robert Sapolsky

Individuating and taking someone else's perspective can be very powerful.

Robert Sapolsky

Well, much of my research over the years has been on stress, and the adverse effects of stress on the health of the central nervous system. All things considered, I've been astonishingly unhelped by my own research.

Robert Sapolsky

When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.

Robert Sapolsky