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

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  24 Copy quote

• Working out what it would take to program goodness into a robot shows not only how much machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with.

  Steven Pinker

  Work Out, Robots, Goodness

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

  10 Copy quote

• One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land.

  Steven Pinker

  Country, Character, Land

  "My week" by Steven Pinker, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

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

  Steven Pinker

  Possibility, Genes, Cases

  7 Copy quote

• ... people notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning.

  Steven Pinker

  Differences, People, Form

  4 Copy quote

• It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.

  Steven Pinker

  Ideas, Years, Tree

  4 Copy quote

• The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.

  Steven Pinker

  Animal, Past, Untamed

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.370, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

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

  Steven Pinker

  Genes, Entirety, Genome

  8 Copy quote

• A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.

  Steven Pinker

  Successful, Input, Conclusion

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.148, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Steven Pinker

  May, Individual, Humane

  5 Copy quote

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

  Steven Pinker

  Radical, Thinker

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Steven Pinker

  Brain, Patterns, Levers

  6 Copy quote

• As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.

  Steven Pinker

  People, Different, Daily Life

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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

Page 9 of 11

First

← Prev

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin