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" Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. "
Steven Pinker
Wretched
Earth
Embodiment
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" 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. "
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" Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. "
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" Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. "
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" There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. "
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" Societies that empower women are less violent in every way. "
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" I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew. "
Steven Pinker
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Jew
" Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. "
Steven Pinker
Like
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" You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. "
Steven Pinker
Sound
Meaning
Brain
" Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand. "
Steven Pinker
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Students
" 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
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" 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
" 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 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
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Like
" Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology. "
Steven Pinker
Over
Water
Revenge
" All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on. "
Steven Pinker
Magic
Reason
Result
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Change
Bad
Conflict
" My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries. "
Steven Pinker
Nature
Human Nature
Back
" 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
" Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change. "
Steven Pinker
Religion
Violence
Change
" As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal. "
Steven Pinker
Long
Learning
Language
" Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance. "
Steven Pinker
Alive
Try
Altruism
" All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news. "
Steven Pinker
Get
News
Reported
" 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.' "
Steven Pinker
Become
Political
Ideas
" I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can. "
Steven Pinker
Time
Rest
Research
" 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
" As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender. "
Steven Pinker
Violence
Women
Down
" 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
Like
Because
Reason
" 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
" 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
" Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship. "
Steven Pinker
You
Speak
Words