Steven Pinker Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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

#Believe #Brain #Magic
“The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existenceâ€¦the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason”
-- Steven Pinker

#Uplifting #People #Soul
“I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Sensitive #Spots #Faculty
“Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. And no, this isn't having "faith" in reason (in the same way that some people have faith in miracles), because we don't "believe" in reason; we use reason.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Faith #Believe #People
“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

#Thinking #People #Privilege
“Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Empowering #Way #Empowering Women
“We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Mean #Self #Practice
“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

#People #Childhood #Trying
“The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Thinking #Organization #Brain
“The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Photography #Art #Attention
“Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You canâ€™t leak your hidden intentions if you donâ€™t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Lying #Believe #Thinking
“Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Inspiring #Photography #Reality
“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.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Democracy #Way #Anarchy
“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

#Believe #People #Soul
“Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Art #Mind #Sculpture
“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

#Men #Illusion #Skepticism
“Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Selfish #Player #Blue
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Thinking #Humanity #Religion
“Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)”
-- Steven Pinker

#Thanks #Language #Redundancy
“Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Atheist #Views #Knowing
“We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Perfect #World #A Perfect World
“The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Zero #Simple #Mind
“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.”
-- Steven Pinker

#World #Language #Human Nature
“Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Mavens #Language #Peeves
“Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Revenge #War #Water
“Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Color #Racism #Favors
“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.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Waste #Climate #Scarcity
“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.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Gmos #Perception #Brain
“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.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Discovery #Political #Intellectual
“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.”
-- Steven Pinker

#Children #Long #Language Development

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