Trusting one's instincts.

They're not ideas, they're instincts.

These instincts are essential for survival in both real and virtual worlds.

To be a good batter, you've got to hang loose and follow your instincts.

Now what I find fascinating about these examples is how they're actually tapping into our primate instincts.

But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past.

Whereas, if we're born with certain instincts, then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness, prejudice and violence.

While some of these instincts may be innate, most are learned, and all of them are hardwired into our brains.

I'm not a scientist. I could have been, perhaps, but I work in this world where I trust my instincts.

This is one area where Obama s consensual instincts do not serve him well. He needs to use his bully pulpit.

It had to add to the frontal part, so that you would have instincts, because they had to cope on land.

Now speaking of evolution, from basic biology, you probably remember that the animal kingdom, including humans, have four basic primal instincts.

There can be no doubt that Singh has the right instincts. He wants Pakistan to succeed as a moderate, modernizing country.

As humans, what's important to remember is that we've developed, we've evolved over time to temper, or tame, these basic animal instincts.

Perhaps there is a single part of our brain that holds all of our gut instincts, the things we know to do before we even think.

They aim their pictures at your best instincts, generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.

Encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion because it goes against our very instincts, which are to surround ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true.

These anti scientific approaches affected not only climate policy, but also foreign policy. The US went to war in Iraq on the basis of Bush s gut instincts and religious convictions, not rigorous evidence.

Poverty, hunger, disease and their attendant maladies are conditions that call for concerted action not just from instincts of human solidarity, but because they are central to achieving the overall goals of the United Nations.

Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them.

But Sarkozy is not quite turning France, long a country hostile to supply side reform, into what many would consider a normal economy. While he has the right instincts concerning labor markets, he is very French on other issues.

He has never been co opted by private interests, be they political, economic, or criminal. He trusts his instincts and likes imaginative public policies, though this worries those who fear another messianic leader at the head of the government.

But Sarkozy is not quite turning France, long a country hostile to supply side reform, into what many would consider a normal economy. While he has the right instincts concerning labor markets, he is very French on other issues.

I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it.

For Musharraf, this means that continuing to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares might get harder. But the current constellation of forces suggests that, barring unforeseen developments, his survival instincts will serve him well for years to come.

They reflect the instincts of Polish voters. People vote for all kinds of parties, from the far right all the way to the left, so long as they are convinced that the parties will deal with their social concerns and grievances.

It drives people from the smart part of the brain that dark, deep well of the subconscious, where instincts and experience, and all the other factors of creativity and good judgment are it drives us to the thin veneer of conscious logic.

In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate.

One in eight Americans depends on Food Stamps to eat. Yet, despite these circumstances, one political party wants to gut tax revenues altogether, and the other is easily dragged along, against its better instincts, out of concern for keeping its rich contributors happy.

Statecraft is a realm where appearances are meant to be deceiving. When Sarkozy, who otherwise has such finely tuned media instincts, protests that he s no different from any other man, he comes dangerously close to confusing the office and the person of the president.

We are, instead, the products of hundreds of millions of years of myopic evolution, and thousands of years of unwritten and then recorded history. Our past has built up layer upon layer of instincts, propensities, habits of thought, patterns of interaction, and material resources.

Here are a few quotes indicating that Man has no nature, from the historian Jose Ortega y Gasset Man has no instincts, from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none, from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould.

How Putin, an astute politician, responds to that pressure will determine his political legacy. And the West s response to Putin s return to the presidency could have a marked effect on whether he presses for liberalizing reforms and survives, or follows his KGB honed authoritarian instincts and stokes further protest.

President Barack Obama s instincts may be an exception here, but he is fighting powerful hidebound forces in the United States, as well as a demagogic populism, in the form of the Tea Party, that is far worse and that might defeat him in 2012, seriously damaging America in the process.

The root of Chen s moral demise is something the classical Greeks identified hubris. Chen s popularity among his party followers, whose fervency often bordered on fundamentalism, changed him from a person with deep democratic instincts into a textbook case of a man who regards power and its prerogatives as being his by right.

In his astonishingly swift rise, he was virtually alone a Democrat, but not a creature of the Democratic Party, a politician of progressive instincts, but not an ideologue. His tendency toward solitude, however, left him disinclined to build new ties and allies in Washington, leaning instead on his family and close friends from Chicago.

To understand what is at stake, it is sufficient to consider the name of the main youth movement fathered by the Kremlin Nashi, or Ours. It is difficult to invent a more potentially explosive moniker, for the name proudly proclaims a division between us and them the most ancient and most destructive of human instincts.

If football and its culminating moment, the World Cup, has become the universal religion of the global age, this is above all because it fulfills, in a non spiritual way, contradictory instincts in human nature. Football magnifies the cult of the individual and the glorification of the hero, but it is also a celebration of the cooperative team spirit.

That plot, which included a young German convert to Islam, showed once again that terrorists can threaten us from both without and within. The nihilistic and destructive instincts that some young Germans of the Baader Meinhof generation acquired from extreme leftist ideology in the 1970 s, it seems, can be transformed into a romanticization of al Qaeda.

Darwin provided the profound understanding that evolution has influenced the shape of our minds as strongly as it has the shape of our bodies. Since humans evolved from the same primate ancestor as modern chimpanzees or gorillas, he suggested one could learn more by comparing human instincts, emotions, and behaviors to those of animals than one can surmise from subjective speculation.

Trump s critics argue that he is playing to the basest instincts of disaffected voters, who hate foreigners (especially Mexicans), distrust bankers (or anyone with a higher education, for that matter), and still can t get over the election of a president whose father was black. Trump, in the comedian Jon Stewart s words, is America s id, or at least the id of a large number of mostly white, mostly older, mostly small town Americans.