Steven Pinker quotes - page 8

The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history. (Steven Pinker)
Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek - why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish. View quote
Steven Pinker
Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
My laptop has freed me to travel. View quote
Steven Pinker
Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. View quote
Steven Pinker
No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. View quote
Steven Pinker
If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time. View quote
Steven Pinker
For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on. (Steven Pinker)
If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind. View quote
Steven Pinker
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high. View quote
Steven Pinker
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men. View quote
Steven Pinker
Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world. View quote
Steven Pinker
An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny. View quote
Steven Pinker
It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago. (Steven Pinker)
My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
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. View quote
Steven Pinker
[E]quality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. ... If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality. View quote
Steven Pinker