top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Family quotes

"The real beauty of a house is always the happiness inside that house!"

"We grow up opposing our parents only to become like them enough to oppose our children who behave as we once did-a reminder of how dreadful we were toward those now vindicated grandparents. And you thought God had no sense of humor."

"Grandchildren are their grandparents' toys."
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."

"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."

"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."
bottom of page