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"There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization."
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"Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music."

"I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life."

"The problem with our culture is we cling to so many different truths. Yet, the truths that we cling to also depend on our point of view. Maybe, the journey to a truth that can be free of hatred, bias and injustice requires a journey of the soul to see all view points."

"For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned."
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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