Steven Pinker Quotes - Page 4

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• The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.

  Steven Pinker

  Mother, Sleep, Boys

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.460, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Dominance in an adaptation to anarchy and it serves no purpose in a society that has undergone a civilising process or in an international system regulated by agreements and norms. Anything that deflates the concept of dominance is likely to drive down the frequency of fights between individuals and wars.

  Steven Pinker

  War, Fighting, Agreement

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• According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.

  Steven Pinker

  Gray Matter, Differences, Brain

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.73, Penguin

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• The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.

  Steven Pinker

  War, Europe, Tolls

  "Is Human Violence On The Wane?". "Science Friday" with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. October 7, 2011.

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• The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.

  Steven Pinker

  Bullying, Children, Gay

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• Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.

  Steven Pinker

  Wish, Would Be, Needs

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• Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.

  Steven Pinker

  Years, Problem, Hundred

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.138, W. W. Norton & Company

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• If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.

  Steven Pinker

  Commitment, Makeup, Vulnerable

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.18, Penguin

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• Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?

  Steven Pinker

  Believe, Ideas, People

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• The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

  Steven Pinker

  Mind, Religion, Atrocities

  Alan Page Fiske, Tage Shakti Rai, Steven Pinker (2014). “Virtuous Violence”, p.16, Cambridge University Press

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• Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.

  Steven Pinker

  Party, Technique, Use

  "War And Violence On The Decline In Modern Times". "Talk Of The Nation" with Neal ConanN, www.npr.org. December 7, 2011.

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• One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Judging, Language

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”, p.409, Penguin UK

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• For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

  Steven Pinker

  Civilization, Accomplishment, Enlightenment

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.737, Penguin

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• By all measures men are the more violent gender.

  Steven Pinker

  Men, Gender, Violent

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• The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, Teaching, Taken

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.594, Penguin UK

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• Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people.

  Steven Pinker

  Lying, Believe, Thinking

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• The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

  Steven Pinker

  Compassion, Capacity, Reflexes

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.203, Penguin

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• The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.

  Steven Pinker

  Numbers, Psychology, Tasks

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.517, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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.

  Steven Pinker

  Men, Illusion, Skepticism

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.209, Penguin

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• The world has far too much morality.

  Steven Pinker

  World, Too Much, Morality

  Alan Page Fiske, Tage Shakti Rai, Steven Pinker (2014). “Virtuous Violence”, p.15, Cambridge University Press

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• You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is alive at 9 A.M. and is alive at 5 P.M., she was also alive at noon. Zebras in the wild never wear underwear. Opening a jar of a new brand of peanut butter will not vaporize the house. People never shove meat thermometers in their ears. A gerbil is smaller than Mt. Kilimanjaro.

  Steven Pinker

  Dog, Zebras, People

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• My laptop has freed me to travel.

  Steven Pinker

  Laptops, Programming

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• Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.

  Steven Pinker

  Two, Degrees, Might

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• Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, Struggle, Compassion

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• The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

  Steven Pinker

  Running, Passion, Mean

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.211, Penguin

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