Steven Pinker Quotes - Page 9

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

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.

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.

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

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.

A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.

The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.

[Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies.

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

... people notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.

Disgust is intuitive microbiology

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.