top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface."
Standard
Customized
More
"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Chameleonesque, hobbitish, unicorned, stompled, selfishism, and unwakeable may not be real words, but you do know what they mean."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters."
Author Name
Personal Development
"NE'TWORK: Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.......RETI'CULATED: Made of network; formed with interstitial vacuities."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I want to hear you wound my lovely language with your rough barbarian tongue."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The world is built with words."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one's friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The first thing we should do in order to grasp the realm of time travel is by redefining general perception and common concepts regarding time within our daily language structure."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The wonder of words."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one."
History
"Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature."
Art
"Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not."
Learning
"Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with."
Society
"The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions."
Science
"People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without feeling a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we often forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago and become blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out."
Awareness
"Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?"
Philosophy
"Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurobiological basis, and their social distribution."
Science
"I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis."
Science
"If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important."
Society
bottom of page