Steven Pinker Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

• 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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• 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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• The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.

  Steven Pinker

  Typical, Biology, If Then

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Judging, Ordinary

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

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• By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

  Steven Pinker

  Discovery, Political, Intellectual

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• I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

  Steven Pinker

  Thinking, Games, Play

  "Steven Pinker: the mind reader". www.theguardian.com. November 5, 1999.

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• I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

  Steven Pinker

  Thinking, Intellectual, Culture

  "Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace". Interview with John Naughton, www.theguardian.com. 15 October 2011.

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• In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.

  Steven Pinker

  May, Individual, Humane

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• As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

  Steven Pinker

  Commitment, Equality, People

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• But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

  Steven Pinker

  Possibility, Genes, Cases

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• Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.

  Steven Pinker

  Commitment, Equal Treatment, Issues

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.451, Penguin

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• Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

  Steven Pinker

  Genes, Entirety, Genome

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• I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

  Steven Pinker

  Radical, Thinker

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• I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.

  Steven Pinker

  Mysterious, Beneath The Surface, Surface

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• I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.

  Steven Pinker

  Writing, Hockey, Ice

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• I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

  Steven Pinker

  Book, Writing, Years

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• Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

  Steven Pinker

  Mavens, Language, Peeves

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• Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.

  Steven Pinker

  Promise, Benefits, Dawn

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• One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.

  Steven Pinker

  Tools, Psychologist, Know Thyself

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• Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.

  Steven Pinker

  Paris, Turns, Related

  "Surprising Family Trees!". abcnews.go.com. October 18, 2007.

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• People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

  Steven Pinker

  Track, People, Doe

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• 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.

  Steven Pinker

  Impact, Mind, Scales

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• 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.

  Steven Pinker

  Brain, Mind, Bags

  "Will Genetic Engineering Kill Us?" by Mark Baard, www.wired.com. April 16, 2003.

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