Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest. "
Steven Pinker
Numbers
Think
People
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Children
Struggle
Want
" Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. "
Steven Pinker
Self
Events
Brain
" Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture. "
Steven Pinker
Back
Picture
Nature
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Good
Intellectual
Culture
" 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
Seat
Thought
Patterns
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Language
Moon
Talk
" Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. "
Steven Pinker
Violence
Empathy
Human Nature
" If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them. "
Steven Pinker
Journalism
Life
People
" Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related. "
Steven Pinker
Back
Everyone
Enough
" The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration. "
Steven Pinker
Child
Parents
Children
" I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis. "
Steven Pinker
Learning
Understand
You
" 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
" Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. "
Steven Pinker
Moral
Person
Places
" I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. "
Steven Pinker
Communism
Progress
Struggle
" We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them. "
Steven Pinker
Place
Trees
Like
" Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. "
Steven Pinker
Own
Our
Far
" 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
Individual
Person
People
" But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. "
Steven Pinker
Taboo
Even
Genes
" Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. "
Steven Pinker
Art
Out
Nature
" Capitalism saved the world, and there is even a heretical theory now, moving up from the level of individuals to countries: countries that trade more and have more open economies are less likely to fight wars and less likely to have genocides. "
Steven Pinker
Capitalism
Fight
Moving
" It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind. "
Steven Pinker
Were
Mind
Misleading
" 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
Doing
Language
Me
" As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. "
Steven Pinker
People
Equality
Political
" In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them. "
Steven Pinker
Our
Less
Than
" I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. "
Steven Pinker
Culture
Our
Think
" I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties. "
Steven Pinker
Mental
Cheesecake
Sensitive
" Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism. "
Steven Pinker
Spirit
Over
Judaism
" One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected. "
Steven Pinker
People
Life
Live
" 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
Place
Soup
Brain
" 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
Science
Political
Moral