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"Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control."
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"Help does not come from anywhere outside - it comes only from within ourselves."

"I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely."

"It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person."

"Never cry for the same reason twice."

"Some of the madmen are really fun to be with. I soon learnt to relate to them. I soon became one of them. I ended up the maddest of the mad. There is no madder than myself! Please believe it."

"Just because you have been through a bad experience does not give you the ticket to keep going back to that situation over and over again and dramatizing it out of proportion."

"When I see you, I think "I wonder which face she sees when she looks into the mirror."

"Reflect your thoughts and watch others mirror them back to you."

"Feed your mind with thoughts that inspire, motivate, encourage, empower, educate and instruct you by deliberately choosing the information you allow into your world through sight, sound and people."

"An attitude is much deeper than just our emotions or the thoughts we think. It's a decision we make based on our core beliefs and values."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker


"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."


"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."


"The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd."


"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."


"In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die."


"Legal investigation. As Clinton noted, "My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful."


"Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs."


"The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat."


"An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny."


"The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream."
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