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" In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons. "
Steven Pinker
Thinks
Any
Right
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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. "
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" Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world. "
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" 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. "
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" Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business. "
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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. "
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" As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. "
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People
Equality
Political
" 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. "
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Place
Trees
Like
" 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
" 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
" Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. "
Steven Pinker
Like
Internet
Promises
" If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable. "
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Intention
Believe
Doing
" 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. "
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People
Brain
Left
" As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide. "
Steven Pinker
Up
Genocide
Group
" You don't like to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin of life or the fate of the planet? "
Steven Pinker
Friends
You
Business
" 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
" So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents. "
Steven Pinker
Environment
Parents
Genes
" 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
" America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself. "
Steven Pinker
You
Movies
Gun
" 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 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
" Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics. "
Steven Pinker
Memory
Statistics
Us
" 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
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Survival
Competition
Success
" There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?' "
Steven Pinker
Try
Criticism
Peace
" Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business. "
Steven Pinker
Color
Bad
Business
" For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. "
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World
Violence
Accomplishment
" The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. "
Steven Pinker
Simple
Blank
Fact
" You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs. "
Steven Pinker
Believe
You
Kind
" But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses. "
Steven Pinker
Brain
Research
Depend