Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. "
Steven Pinker
Cruel
You
Matter
Related Quotes:
" I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses. "
Steven Pinker
Paths
Bridges
City
" Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. "
Steven Pinker
World
Reading
Technology
" 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
" All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news. "
Steven Pinker
Get
News
Reported
" But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. "
Steven Pinker
Taboo
Even
Genes
" 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
" Societies that empower women are less violent in every way. "
Steven Pinker
Way
Women
Women Are
" Why is it surprising that scientists might have long hair and wear cowboy boots? In fields like neuroscience, where the events you are recording are so minute, I suspect scientists cultivate a boring, reliable image. A scientist with a reputation for flamboyance might be suspect. "
Steven Pinker
Why
Reputation
Long
" Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. "
Steven Pinker
Painting
Poetry
Music
" The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. "
Steven Pinker
Help
Comfort
Early
" I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. "
Steven Pinker
Radical
Thinker
Consider
" Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented. "
Steven Pinker
Party
Monopoly
Violence
" I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs. "
Steven Pinker
Rather
Long-Term
Focus
" The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. "
Steven Pinker
Organization
You
Think
" I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew. "
Steven Pinker
Never
Serious
Jew
" 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
" People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections. "
Steven Pinker
Political
Seem
Today
" 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
" Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world. "
Steven Pinker
Interesting
Reality
World
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Best
Web
Psychology
" 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
" Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them. "
Steven Pinker
Eat
Behavior
Plants
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Life
Goodness
Meaning
" 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
Like
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Say
Need
Better
" 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