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"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."
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Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor."
"Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?"
"Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?"
"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."
"As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones."
Exlpore more Learning quotes
"He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind."
"Reading is an activity of civilized beings."
"Whate'er I read to her. I'll plead for youAs for my patron, stand you so assured,As firmly as yourself were in still place - Yea, and perhaps with more successful wordsThan you, unless you were a scholar, sir.O this learning, what a thing it is!"
"Don't be ashamed of your ignorance, be ashamed of your unwillingness to overcome it."
"Do not be ready to listen to anyone who is ready to show you your past mistakes instead, be ready to listen to someone who is ready to show you the untold lessons from your past mistakes so that you may be able to skip your future mistakes."
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