Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor. "

Steven Pinker

Arts

Think

Kind

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

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

" Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer. "

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

" I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. "

" I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. "

" 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

" 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. "

" There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. "

" A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock? "

" Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy. "

" No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves. "

" There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. "

" 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. "

" My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries. "

" 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. "

" It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind. "

" 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. "

" Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business. "

" 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

" America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself. "

" Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. "

" 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

" If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate. "

" 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. "

" You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs. "