Steven Pinker quotes - page 7

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. (Steven Pinker)
I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew. View quote
Steven Pinker
Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know. View quote
Steven Pinker
'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war. View quote
Steven Pinker
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? View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity. View quote
Steven Pinker
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on. View quote
Steven Pinker
Societies that empower women are less violent in every way. (Steven Pinker)
One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. View quote
Steven Pinker
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. View quote
Steven Pinker
Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene. View quote
Steven Pinker
Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology. (Steven Pinker)
Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. View quote
Steven Pinker
Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one. View quote
Steven Pinker