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"Friendship, like other kinds of altruism, is vulnerable to cheaters, and we have a special name for them: fair-weather friends. These sham friends reap the benefits of associating with a valuable person and mimic signs of warmth in an effort to become valued themselves. But when a little rain falls, they are nowhere in sight."
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"Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree."

"One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood."

"Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends."

"For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends."

"Piper: it looks like we have hole. Percy: Yeah we've got a dam hole! (LOL-ing) Piper: What! Percy: Inside joke. (still LOL-ing) Piper: Whatever."

"I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness."

"I use my friends rather as giglamps : There's another field I see: by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape."

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title."

"True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance."

"Never injure a friend, even in jest."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker


"Instead of asking, "Why is there war? we might ask, "Why is there peace? We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is."


"Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control."


"Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist "Take Back the Night protests) made these environments safer for everyone."


"One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor."


"The [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning, learning is caused by complexity in the mind."


"America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself."


"The whole point of international terrorism is to shock the world with the most horrific spectacle imaginable."


"Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles."


"Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact."
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