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" 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. "

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" A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature. "

Steven Pinker

Nature

Family

Moral

" All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news. "

" Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. "

" Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality. "

" 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. "

" People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like. "

Steven Pinker

Know

Knowing

" People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time. "

" 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. "

" Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. "

" By all measures men are the more violent gender. "

Steven Pinker

Measures

Violent

" The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. "

" Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution. "

" M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say. "

" The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years. "

" 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

Genocide

Group

" 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. "

" Personality and socialization aren't the same thing. "

" 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. "

" Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young. "

" 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. "

" I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties. "

" An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate. "

" Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other. "

" I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs. "

" The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. "

" Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday. "

" 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. "