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Exlpore more Knowledge quotes

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

"It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese."

"If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come."

"The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust."

"I who know many present things by my art," replied the Hermit with a smile, "have yet little knowledge of things future. Therefore I do not know whether any man or woman or beast in the whole world will be alive when the sun sets tonight. But be of good hope. The damsel is likely to live as long as any her age."

"Have books 'happened' to you? Unless your answer to that question is 'yes,' I'm unsure how to talk to you."

"Knowing more than someone does not necessarily mean that you know every single thing they know."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker


"Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate."


"As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones."


"Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal."


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


"We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naA ve to work toward a better one."


"I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out."


"Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point."


"The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe."


"The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason."


"Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge-not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time."
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