Steven Pinker Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Steven Pinker on Wise Famous Quotes.
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes.
Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.
Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister.
Peppier n. The waiter at a fancy restaurant whose sole purpose seems to be walking around asking diners if they want ground pepper.
The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.
The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly: (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.
The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator.
I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs.
At every moment we choose, consciously or unconsciously, between good things now and better things later.
Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it's a more inviting one.
It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.
The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.
Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have gantlets of improbabilities.
Furbling v. Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank even when you're the only person in line.
Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift
The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.
Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
As they say, everybody wins. Of course, an exchange at a single moment in time only pays when there is a division of labor.
Hextable n. The record you find in someone else's collection which instantly tells you you could never go out with them.
Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived.
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
Legal investigation. As Clinton noted, My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful.
Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth.
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't.
A successful learner, ... must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.
I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.
As we saw in chapter 3, one way the early modern Europeans used Odyssean self-control was to keep sharp knives out of reach at the dinner table.
By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined "despotism" down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers. At
Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster,
Shoeburyness n. The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from someone else's bottom.
In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth.
The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38
A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication; it can lead to better reasoning.
Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth.
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.
The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution.
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.