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

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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. "

" I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats? "

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

" All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on. "

" 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. "

" I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. "

" 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. "

" I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives. "

" You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again. "

" Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology. "

" But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses. "

" 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. "

" Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today's Republican party, just as the two Georges - the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern - found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972. "