Steven Pinker Quotes - Page 8

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Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today's Republican party, just as the two Georges - the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern - found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972.

Steven Pinker

Christian, Party, Two

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Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

Steven Pinker

Emotional, Political, Mind

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Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

Steven Pinker

Art, Human Nature, Scholar

"A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

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You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

Steven Pinker

Hate, Believe, Verbs

"Basic instincts". Interview with Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. September 22, 2007.

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Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.

Steven Pinker

War, Believe, People

"History and the Decline of Human Violence". Interview with Gareth Cook, www.scientificamerican.com. October 4, 2011.

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The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

Steven Pinker

Mean, Equality, Differences

Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.208, Penguin

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I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Steven Pinker

Memories, Years, Verbs

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Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

Steven Pinker

Ambition, Unique, Opportunity

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In the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.

Steven Pinker

Past, Data, Two

"The Blank Slate". Book by Steven Pinker, 2002.

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No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.

Steven Pinker

Expression, People, Individuality

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Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

Steven Pinker

Ocean, Moon, Tree

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Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.

Steven Pinker

Running, Dog, Men

Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.118, W. W. Norton & Company

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The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.

Steven Pinker

Spring, Glowing, Data

Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

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Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.'

Steven Pinker

Book, Helping, Impossible

Steven Pinker (2003). “How the Mind Works”, p.325, Penguin UK

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In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.

Steven Pinker

Running, White, Space

Steven Pinker (2003). “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”, p.171, Penguin UK

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Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

Steven Pinker

Mean, People, Guy

"The Importance of Being Businessworthy" by Per L. Saxegaard, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 4, 2015.

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Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.

Steven Pinker

Perspective, Suffering, Inability

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In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'

Steven Pinker

Class, Ideas, Political

Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.154, Penguin

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Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.

Steven Pinker

Mother, White, Earth

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Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.

Steven Pinker

Style, Way, Consistent

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The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.

Steven Pinker

Rights, People, Desire

Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.48, W. W. Norton & Company

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My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Steven Pinker

Opinion, Philosopher, Human Nature

"A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

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Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.

Steven Pinker

Design, Evolution, Natural

Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.158, W. W. Norton & Company

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However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

Steven Pinker

Class, Want, Might

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Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

Steven Pinker

Writing, People, Creative

Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.361, W. W. Norton & Company

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Born: September 18, 1954
Occupation: Psychologist
Cite this Page: Citation

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