Top 180 Robert M. Sapolsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

2. “An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

3. “The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

4. “On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

5. “Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They’re about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

6. “I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

7. “Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won’t have to go to work on your birthday.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

8. “How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

9. “Words have power. They can save, cure, uplift, devastate, deflate, and kill. And unconscious priming with words influences pro- and antisocial behaviors.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

10. “We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

11. “But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you’re going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

12. “In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

13. “If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you’re in big trouble.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

14. “The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

15. “Irrational optimism can be great; it’s why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

16. “Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

17. “In a study of employees throughout the world working for the same multinational bank, what was the most important reason cited to help someone? Among Americans it was that the person had previously helped them; for Chinese it was that the person was higher ranking; in Spain, that they were a friend or acquaintance.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

18. “A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

19. “Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

20. “We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

21. “As adults, these kids are mostly what you’d expect. Low IQ and poor cognitive skills. Problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic. Anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

22. “Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

23. “Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless – we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

24. “Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors – normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes us us.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

25. “Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There’s no way out of it. You cannot psychologically reframe your experience and decide you did not like the shirt, here’s an excuse to throw it out – that sort of thing.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

26. “Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. Much as with depression, anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. In this case, people prone toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

27. “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

28. “We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

29. “In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

30. “You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

31. “Knowledge emerged about synapses, neurotransmitter-ology was born, and this idea was modified – a new memory requires the formation of a new synapse, a new connection between an axon terminal and a dendritic spine.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

32. “The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone’s pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

33. “Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context – who you are, your environment, and who that person is.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

34. “This is thought to reflect the killer combination that these folks are often burdened with, namely, high work demands but little autonomy – responsibility without control.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

35. “Most of us don’t collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

36. “I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

37. “The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

38. “There’s also subliminal cuing about beauty.18 From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We’re more likely to vote for attractive people or hire them, less likely to convict them of crimes, and, if they are convicted, more likely to dole out shorter sentences.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

39. “Cognitive therapists, like Aaron Beck of the University of Pennsylvania, even consider depression to be primarily a disorder of thought, rather than emotion, in that sufferers tend to see the world in a distorted, negative way.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

40. “Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

41. “Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

42. “Something roughly akin to love is needed for proper biological development, and its absence is among the most aching, distorting stressors that we can suffer.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

43. “Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

44. “Damasio has produced an influential theory about emotion-laden decision making, rooted in the philosophies of Hume and William James; this will soon be discussed.61 Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings – “How would I feel if this outcome occurred?” – and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

45. “In a typical study, higher testosterone levels would be observed in those male prisoners with higher rates of aggression. But being aggressive stimulates testosterone secretion; no wonder more aggressive individuals had higher levels.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

46. “Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, “Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

47. “It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

48. “Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

49. “Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

50. “And their brains? Decreased total brain size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Except for the amygdala. Which is enlarged. That pretty much says it all.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky