Top 40 David M. Buss Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “The consequences of women’s attractiveness for a man’s social status are critical. Everyday folklore tells us that our mate is a reflection of ourselves. Men are particularly concerned about status, reputation, and hierarchies because elevated rank has always been an important means of acquiring the resources that make men attractive to women. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect that a man will be concerned about the effect that his mate has on his social status.”

— David M. Buss

2. “To maximize the chances of preserving a long-term bond, couples would do well to remain faithful; produce children together; secure ample economic resources; act kind, generous, and understanding; and attend to their mate’s sexual and emotional desires. These actions do not guarantee a successful relationship, but they increase the odds substantially.”

— David M. Buss

3. “Emotional support is yet another facet of commitment, revealed by behavior such as being available in times of trouble and listening to the partner’s problems.”

— David M. Buss

4. “As one woman noted, “The best way to get over one man is to get under another.”24.”

— David M. Buss

5. “Most sexual predators are people we know in settings we normally inhabit -at a party of a friend, at the department of a date, or in the sanctuary of our homes.”

— David M. Buss

6. “Upset over neglect and unreliability reflects a conflict over investment of time and effort. It takes effort to be on time. Reliability requires relinquishing time and resources that could be channeled toward other goals. Neglect signals a low investment, indicating that the man lacks the depth of commitment necessary to perform acts that require even minimal cost for the woman’s benefit.”

— David M. Buss

7. “The modern proliferation of porn consumption, in short, has escalated both conflict between the sexes and the harms of female-female competition. The technology behind porn is modern. The sexual psychology it exploits is evolutionary ancient.”

— David M. Buss

8. “Men need to understand the sexual over-perception bias that afflicts their mating minds. They should know that, most of the time, the women smiling at them are merely being friendly or polite, not signaling sexual interest.”

— David M. Buss

9. “Within-species sexual conflict arms races are analogous to arms races between predators and prey.”

— David M. Buss

10. “Male sexual jealousy is the leading cause of the murder of adult women, accounting for between 50 and 70 percent of all such homicides.8 Police know this. When women are murdered, the prime suspects are boyfriends, husbands, ex-boyfriends, and ex-husbands. Although jealousy sometimes motivates women to murder, only 3 percent of murdered men are killed by their romantic partners or exes, and many of these female-perpetrated homicides are women defending themselves against a jealously violent man.”

— David M. Buss

11. “Using one’s own sexual mind as an infallible guide for inferring the sexual minds of others is an error.”

— David M. Buss

12. “From the moment of conception, when the one tiny sperm joins the nutrient-rich egg, women are already contributing much more than the man.”

— David M. Buss

13. “Online pornography allows individuals to explore creative sexual possibilities they never knew existed but also creates entirely unrealistic expectations for real life sexual interactions.”

— David M. Buss

14. “Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder. – DONALD SYMONS, “What Do Men Want?”

— David M. Buss

15. “Identifying evolutionary origins of nefarious behavior in no way justifies or excuses it.”

— David M. Buss

16. “Other exceptions occur when women mate with substantially younger men. Many of these cases occur not because of strong preferences by women for younger men but rather because both older women and younger men lack bargaining power on the mating market.”

— David M. Buss

17. “Differences in desirability create havoc in at least two fundamental ways. The first centers around misperceptions. A man who is a 6 but thinks he’s an 8 will be utterly irritated when the woman who’s an 8 whom he’s trying to chat up rejects his advances. Although women and men both can err in their self-perceived mate value, research shows that men are more likely than women to be overconfident in a variety of domains.”

— David M. Buss

18. “We are the first species in the known history of three and a half billion years of life on earth with the capacity to control our own destiny. The prospect of designing our destiny remains excellent to the degree that we comprehend our evolutionary past. Only by examining the complex repertoire of human sexual strategies can we know where we came from. Only by understanding why these human strategies have evolved can we control where we are going.”

— David M. Buss

19. “One way to curtail men’s proprietary mindset is to empower women -a trend that started with first-wave feminists who ushered in women’s right to vote and continues today with women’s increasing access to their own resources.”

— David M. Buss

20. “A second way in which desirability discrepancies create mating conflict centers not on men’s misperceptions but rather on the hard, cruel fact mentioned earlier – men view many women as “above threshold” in attractiveness, but women tend to be attracted primarily to men in the top twentieth percentile.”

— David M. Buss

21. “Feminist scholars rightly stress the importance of power in sexual conflict. It must be recognized, however, that men’s motivations for power, status, and resources exist in part because women have preferred to mate with men who possess power, status, and resources. Neglecting this part of the causal origins of sexual conflict will impede efforts to alter it.”

— David M. Buss

22. “First, an evolutionary perspective does not view sexual coercion as a biological imperative, as inevitable, or as ineluctable. Just as modern science has created novel vaccines and drugs to eliminate many “natural” diseases, with enough knowledge we can create personal, social, and legal environments that curtail or suppress the components of male psychology that contribute to sexual coercion.”

— David M. Buss

23. “Worldwide, one of the most highly valued characteristics in a committed mate is kindness. It signals a willingness to engage in a cooperative alliance, an essential ingredient for success in long-term mating.”

— David M. Buss

24. “Men’s affairs are more likely to be purely sexual; women’s affairs are more often emotional.”

— David M. Buss

25. “Just as modern science has created novel vaccines and drugs to eliminate many “natural diseases”, with enough knowledge we can create personal, social, and legal environments that curtail or suppress the components of male psychology that contribute to sexual coercion.”

— David M. Buss

26. “Men’s jealousy is especially attuned to rivals who have status and resources; women’s jealousy is especially attuned to rivals who are physically attractive.”

— David M. Buss

27. “Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources.”

— David M. Buss

28. “For every incremental gain in men’s ability to deceive women, women evolve comparable incremental gains in their ability to detect deception.”

— David M. Buss

29. “Sexual dissatisfaction is linked with marital unhappiness, which is a good predictor of divorce.”

— David M. Buss

30. “Women of striking beauty are desired by many men, but only a few men prosper in attracting them. The qualities of kindness, intelligence, dependability, athleticism, looks, and economic prospects are all present rarely in the same person.”

— David M. Buss

31. “It is a source of power to recognize that women hold the reins in this evolutionary equation, and their mate selections, in principle, have the power to undermine male control and create greater equality between the sexes.”

— David M. Buss

32. “Unrequited love is the foundation for fatal attraction.”

— David M. Buss

33. “The effectiveness of playing hard to get as a long-term attraction technique stems from providing men with two key reproductive assets: desirability on the mating market and a signal that he alone will have sexual access.”

— David M. Buss

34. “Men deceive women by feigning an interest in commitment to achieve a quick sexual score. They also feign confidence, status, kindness, and resources that they lack. Men try to abscond with the sexual benefit without paying the cost of commitment.”

— David M. Buss

35. “Darwin hat a wonderful scientific habit of noticing facts that seemed inconsistent with his theories.”

— David M. Buss

36. “Adolescent men often live in a world where available women are in scarce supply, because women prefer mature men with position and affluence. Young men’s strategies reflect these local conditions of female scarcity, because they engage in highly risky competition strategies, committing the vast majority of violent crimes of sexual coercion, robbery, battery, and murder.”

— David M. Buss

37. “Women who make more money than their husbands tend to leave them.”

— David M. Buss

38. “One colleague captured the conflict that can ensue by expressing frustration after several years of unhappy dating: “Why am I being pestered by guys I don’t care about, but the men I’m genuinely attracted to seem to show little interest in me?” I told her that she is an 8 chasing after 10s but being pursued by 6s. It dawned on her that pursuing men just outside of her mate-value range was the source of her misery.”

— David M. Buss

39. “Which men are most likely to be controlling? Those who are lower in mate value. These men ramp up heavy mate guarding because they believe they have lucked out in attracting a desirable woman and believe that she will be difficult or impossible to replace.”

— David M. Buss

40. “A woman’s happiness increases when the man brings more economic resources to the union and shows kindness, affection, and commitment. A man’s happiness increases when the woman is more physically attractive than he is, and when she shows kindness, affection, and commitment.”

— David M. Buss