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" Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. "

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" My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance. "

Steven Pinker

Job

Chair

Appreciate

" Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. "

" The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain. "

Steven Pinker

Because

Reason

" No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. "

" I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net. "

Steven Pinker

History

Science

" I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs. "

" 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. "

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

" The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. "

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

Steven Pinker

Going

Hockey

" Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. "

" We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. "

" By all measures men are the more violent gender. "

Steven Pinker

Measures

Violent

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties. "

" You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again. "

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

" Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy. "

" Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. "

" 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. "

" There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. "

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

" 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. "

" My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test. "

Steven Pinker

Politics

Police

" I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. "

" The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. "

" Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent. "

" An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets. "