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" 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
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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. "
Steven Pinker
Minds
Our
Scale
" In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons. "
Steven Pinker
Thinks
Any
Right
" If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate. "
Steven Pinker
Literacy
You
Will
" 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
" With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution. "
Steven Pinker
Human Nature
Problem
Violence
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism. "
Steven Pinker
Spirit
Over
Judaism
" 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
" We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable? "
Steven Pinker
Heaven
Dry
Hungry
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
People
Brain
Left
" The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. "
Steven Pinker
Technology
Humanity
Changes
" 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
" All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news. "
Steven Pinker
Get
News
Reported
" 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
" Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world. "
Steven Pinker
Window
World
Human Nature
" The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer. "
Steven Pinker
Art
Attention
Directing
" If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success. "
Steven Pinker
You
Crime
Success
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Science
Control
Freedom
" 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
" 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
" If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important. "
Steven Pinker
People
Violence
Look
" Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. "
Steven Pinker
Own
Language
Commonly
" 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
" I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. "
Steven Pinker
World
Because
Interested
" 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
" Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject. "
Steven Pinker
Light
Action
Change
" The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years. "
Steven Pinker
Years
Violence
See
" It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. "
Steven Pinker
Men
Battle
Death