"Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous."

“Although one anthropologist mentioned that "undoubtedly these rituals are exceedingly painful," they are not usually considered traumatic to children. Since empathy with children's feelings is nearly absent, gratuitous mutilation of the children is common, such as tightly binding newborn infant's heads for months to elongate the skull, or .”

“As with infanticide, the sexual abuse of children is widely reported by anthropologists, but in positive terms. "This would not constitute 'abuse' if in that society the behavior was not proscribed". Like all other anthropologists who report the regular masturbating and sucking of children's genitals, he calls this "love.”

“Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.”

“But until my Journal of Psychoanalytical Anthropology began to be published and until my book The Emotional Life of Nations came out, few realized how much anthropologists distorted mothering in their tribes.”

“Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wet nurses as the mothers themselves were.”

“Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.”