Top 40 Robert Wright Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than virtue.”

— Robert Wright

2. “William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

— Robert Wright

3. “In the great non zero sum games of history, if you’re part of the problem, then you’ll likely be a victim of the solution.”

— Robert Wright

4. “Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.”

— Robert Wright

5. “We are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there. Natural selection has a malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying “Just kidding.”

— Robert Wright

6. “The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have written, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

— Robert Wright

7. “We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.”

— Robert Wright

8. “The Dalai Lama has said, “Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”

— Robert Wright

9. “One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing – the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more.”

— Robert Wright

10. “Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. As the Buddha emphasized, our ongoing attempts to feel better tend to involve an overestimation of how long “better” is going to last. What’s more, when “better” ends, it can be followed by “worse” – an unsettled feeling, a thirst for more. Long before psychologists were describing the hedonic treadmill, the Buddha saw it.”

— Robert Wright

11. “This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance.”

— Robert Wright

12. “It is the study of how the human brain was designed – by natural selection – to mislead us, even enslave us.”

— Robert Wright

13. “In fact, one big lesson from Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it.”

— Robert Wright

14. “Sensual pleasures are the whip natural selection uses to control us, to keep us in the thrall of its warped values system.”

— Robert Wright

15. “The Buddha said anger has a “poisoned root and honeyed tip.”

— Robert Wright

16. “Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.”

— Robert Wright

17. “Being a person’s true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest.”

— Robert Wright

18. “Jesus is not from Georgia. Jesus does not speak English. And Jesus is not a member of the NRA.”

— Robert Wright

19. “Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.”

— Robert Wright

20. “Giving men marriage tips is a little like offering Vikings a free booklet titled How Not to Pillage.”

— Robert Wright

21. “Humans have various ways of coping with extended stress, and one is the anticipation of a better time. Here, as with retribution, there is often a kind of symmetry: the more intense the stress and the more hopeless the situation, the more fabulous the coming times that are anticipated.”

— Robert Wright

22. “Certainly the prefrontal cortex is an important thing; I’m as proud of mine as the next guy.”

— Robert Wright

23. “This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. 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.”

— Robert Wright

24. “Edward Tylor noted in 1874 that the religions of “savage” societies were “almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainstream of practical religion.” Tylor wasn’t saying that savages lack morality. He stressed that the moral standards of savages are generally “well-defined and praiseworthy.” It’s just that “these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion,” rather than on a religious foundation.”

— Robert Wright

25. “Next time you see a yardful of sprouting dandelions, note that they look remarkably like things we call “flowers.” And later, when the flowers turn into fluff balls, look closely at one of those fluff balls and ask yourself whether it’s really so unattractive.”

— Robert Wright

26. “The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure; we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.”

— Robert Wright

27. “As Kurzban has summarized this finding, “We think we’re better than average at not being biased in thinking that we’re better than average.”

— Robert Wright

28. “This question goes way beyond my own little episodes of transcending overcaffeination and melancholy. It applies, in principle, to all negative feelings: fears, anxieties, loathing, self-loathing, and more. Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.”

— Robert Wright

29. “If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.”

— Robert Wright

30. “Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.”

— Robert Wright

31. “When monogamy is found in subsistence-level cultures, Alexander calls it “ecologically imposed.” When it appears in more affluent, more stratified cultures, he calls it “socially imposed.”3 The question is why society imposed it.”

— Robert Wright

32. “Natural selection is an inanimate process, devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless refiner, an ingenious craftsman.”

— Robert Wright

33. “We are right to say that we never dislike people without a reason. But the reason, often, is that it is not in our interests to like them; liking them won’t elevate our social status, aid our acquisition of material or sexual resources, help our kin, or do any of the other things that during evolution have made genes prolific. The feeling of “rightness” accompanying our dislike is just window dressing. Once you’ve seen that, the feeling’s power may diminish.”

— Robert Wright

34. “Buddha believed that the less you judge things – including the contents of your mind – the more clearly you’ll see them, and the less deluded you’ll be.”

— Robert Wright

35. “There’s no doubt that meditation training has allowed some people to become essentially indifferent to what otherwise would have been unbearable pain.”

— Robert Wright

36. “There is in the world today a great and mysterious force that shapes the fortunes of millions of people. It is called the stock market.”

— Robert Wright

37. “Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings – fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions – are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.”

— Robert Wright

38. “In other words, if you were to build into the brain a component in charge of public relations, it would look something like the conscious self.”

— Robert Wright

39. “If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together – the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness – you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.”

— Robert Wright

40. “Next time you see an unblemished expanse of grass, think about the chemicals that probably got dumped in your vicinity to create it. Are you grateful for that?”

— Robert Wright

41. “In which case, he was basically saying: ‘Look, if there is part of you that isn’t under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it.”

— Robert Wright

42. “Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there’s more to life that the sum of its subatomic particles – some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as “divine” in some sense of the word?”

— Robert Wright

43. “So form – the stuff the human body is made of – isn’t really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies.”

— Robert Wright

44. “The distinction was nicely drawn by a study in which both men and women were asked about the minimal level of intelligence they would accept in a person they were “dating.” The average response, for both male and female, was: average intelligence. They were also asked how smart a person would have to be before they would consent to sexual relations. The women said: Oh, in that case, markedly above average. The men said: Oh, in that case, markedly below average.”

— Robert Wright

45. “A female in a high-MPI species may seek signs of generosity, trustworthiness, and, especially, an enduring commitment to her in particular.”

— Robert Wright

46. “Friendship, affection, trust – these are the things that, long before people signed contracts, long before they wrote down laws, held human societies together.”

— Robert Wright

47. “Men seem loath to concede the superiority of another human being, even in such trivial realms as municipal geography. The reason, perhaps, is that during human evolution males who too readily sought reconciliation after a fight, or otherwise needlessly submitted to others, saw their status drop, and with it their inclusive fitness.”

— Robert Wright