Advertisements
Steven Pinker Quotes
Advertisements
Advertisements
Advertisements
Advertisements
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
Friendship Quotes
Love Quotes
Life Quotes
Funny Quotes
Motivational Quotes
Inspirational Quotes
Advertisements
Text Quotes
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 Quotes)
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 (Steven Pinker Quotes)
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 Quotes)
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 (Steven Pinker Quotes)
The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress (Steven Pinker Quotes)
The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian’s dream (Steven Pinker Quotes)
Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world (Steven Pinker Quotes)
Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement (Steven Pinker Quotes)
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 (Steven Pinker Quotes)
You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself (Steven Pinker Quotes)
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false (Steven Pinker Quotes)
One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology (Steven Pinker Quotes)
Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all (Steven Pinker Quotes)
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen (Steven Pinker Quotes)
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs (Steven Pinker Quotes)
Equality 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 (Steven Pinker Quotes)
All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers (Steven Pinker Quotes)
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous (Steven Pinker Quotes)
The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit (Steven Pinker Quotes)
In our society, the best predictor of a man’s wealth is his wife’s looks, and the best predictor of a woman’s looks is her husband’s wealth (Steven Pinker Quotes)
Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don’t need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different (Steven Pinker Quotes)
Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time (Steven Pinker Quotes)
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth (Steven Pinker Quotes)
We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naive to work toward a better one (Steven Pinker Quotes)
The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise (Steven Pinker Quotes)
Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person (Steven Pinker Quotes)
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 (Steven Pinker Quotes)
As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can’t kill someone and trade with him too (Steven Pinker Quotes)
In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints... and gods (Steven Pinker Quotes)
Working out what it would take to program goodness into a robot shows not only how much machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with (Steven Pinker Quotes)