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"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."
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"My heart broke and my mind opened, tragedy works in a funny way like that ~ what once tore me apart was actually what was setting my truth free."

"Day or night, good or bad, all things from within."

"We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember."

"I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary."

"I don't need psychologyI am not a sociopathNeither and Psychopath."

"You must give permission for people to alter your thoughts. No matter how hard they knock, they can't get into your brain unless you open the door."

"When we hold-on to someone's imperfections we become emotionally pair-bonded to their maladies."

"Showing a lack of self-control is in the same vein granting authority to others: 'Perhaps I need someone else to control me."

"When you build a fence around yourself, you'll wonder why people are afraid to approach you, because the pride in the fence is the cause of your blindness."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker

"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."

"Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?"

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

"There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization."

"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."

"My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries."

"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."

"The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero."

"Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist."
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