Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?' "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Language

Moon

Talk

" As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. "

Steven Pinker

People

Power

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

" 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. "

" The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution. "

" Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. "

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

" Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on. "

" Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works. "

" Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. "

" 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. "

" 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

Think

Aggression

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities. "

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

" 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. "

" As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. "

" No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable. "

" 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. "

" 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. "