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" We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade. "
Steven Pinker
Visual
Fade
Stay
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" Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare. "
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Number
Who
Out
" Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. "
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Good
Children
Mean
" We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. "
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Fans
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" 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. "
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Health
Beauty
Eye
" 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
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Possibilities
Violence
Inequality
" Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries. "
Steven Pinker
War
Take
Poorer
" I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something. "
Steven Pinker
Mysterious
Surface
Deep
" 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
" I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest. "
Steven Pinker
Numbers
Think
People
" Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy. "
Steven Pinker
Paris
Out
Fellow
" Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties. "
Steven Pinker
Ancestors
Nothing
Think
" 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
" 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
Me
" However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution. "
Steven Pinker
Class
Better
Revolution
" I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. "
Steven Pinker
Radical
Thinker
Consider
" Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance. "
Steven Pinker
People
Underestimate
Us
" Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. "
Steven Pinker
Wretched
Earth
Embodiment
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Some People
War
Peace
" 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
" Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. "
Steven Pinker
Art
Out
Nature
" 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
Me
" 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
" 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. "
Steven Pinker
Acceptance
Change
People
" 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
" 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
" My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance. "
Steven Pinker
Job
Chair
Appreciate
" 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
" People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time. "
Steven Pinker
Impression
Language
Over
" 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