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Steven Pinker

"Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs."

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"Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs."

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Amber Hurdle

"Your moral foundation and character currently depend on what you hear."

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Amber Hurdle

"Morality exists in the neurons as a natural sensation. Religion only tries to codify it."

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Amber Hurdle

"Ethics are the things that say, 'Don't stick your finger in the socket.' The world says, 'It's okay because we've shut off the electricity.' And at the point that we've chosen to listen to the world and ignore our ethics, we say, 'I'm having a really hard time getting back up."

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Amber Hurdle

"People shouldn't have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty."

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Amber Hurdle

"The Lord does not love wicked people with self-interest and involved in inquity."

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Amber Hurdle

"It is better to have little and be right than to have much and be wrong."

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Amber Hurdle

"The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts."

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Amber Hurdle

"I've a regard for law, although I do not always agree with it. Without law, man becomes a beast."

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Amber Hurdle

"To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity."

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Amber Hurdle

"Conquer the angry one by not getting angry; conquer the wicked by goodness; conquer the stingy by generosity, and the liar by speaking the truth."

Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
"I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker."
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Steven Pinker
"The Darwinian approach to sex is often attacked as being antifeminist, but that is just wrong. Indeed, the accusation is baffling on the face of it, especially to the many feminist women who have developed and tested the theory. The core of feminism is surely the goal of ending sexual discrimination and exploitation, an ethical and political position that is in no danger of being refuted by any foreseeable scientific theory or discovery."
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Steven Pinker
"Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not."
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Steven Pinker
"So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents."
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Steven Pinker
"Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned."
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Steven Pinker
"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."
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Steven Pinker
"What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened."
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Steven Pinker
"As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully."
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Steven Pinker
"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."
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Steven Pinker
"Perhaps we should rejoice that people's emotions aren't designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one's group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That's why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group's, the outcomes are some of the history's worst atrocities."
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