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" A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock? "

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" There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal. "

Steven Pinker

Arts

World

Visual

" The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer. "

" Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity. "

" 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. "

" If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

Steven Pinker

Think

Aggression

" 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. "

" It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics. "

" Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. "

" 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. "

" The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. "

" Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. "

" Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. "

" 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. "

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

" The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. "

" Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. "

" People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections. "

" If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think. "

" You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. "

" There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success. "

" All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand. "

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

" For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.' "

" Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries. "

" Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. "