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"People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections."
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"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."
"Never underestimate the power of a simple thought."
"I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'."
"I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency."
"In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker
"There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization."
"The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call "self-help."
"Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world."
"Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another."
"We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time."
"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."
"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."
"The psychological components of war have not gone away-dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception."
"A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."
"Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease."
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