Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works. "
Steven Pinker
You
Find
Language
Related Quotes:
" A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence. "
Steven Pinker
Confidence
Police
People
" Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with. "
Steven Pinker
Tyranny
Democracy
You
" People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time. "
Steven Pinker
Impression
Language
Over
" 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
Way
Life
" 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
" Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats? "
Steven Pinker
Fish
Moon
Trees
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Living
Way
Understand
" The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer. "
Steven Pinker
Art
Attention
Directing
" The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind. "
Steven Pinker
Complex
Single
Mind
" 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
" People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely. "
Steven Pinker
Acceptance
Change
People
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Animals
Speech
Language
" Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. "
Steven Pinker
Been
Thoughtful
Style
" You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself. "
Steven Pinker
Body
Think
Plant
" Personality and socialization aren't the same thing. "
Steven Pinker
Personality
Same Thing
Thing
" Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language. "
Steven Pinker
Language
Kid
Up
" 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
" There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities. "
Steven Pinker
Possibilities
Violence
Inequality
" When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy. "
Steven Pinker
People
Personality
Time
" Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world. "
Steven Pinker
Knowledge
History
World
" If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think. "
Steven Pinker
Used
Think
Reflect
" I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew. "
Steven Pinker
Never
Serious
Jew
" 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
" We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. "
Steven Pinker
Our
Violence
Learning
" In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons. "
Steven Pinker
Thinks
Any
Right
" Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. "
Steven Pinker
Death
Dying
Violence
" 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
" We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. "
Steven Pinker
Same
Fans
Someone
" 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
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Ancestors
Nothing
Think