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"The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize litterers) as by the signaling of a social norm: This is the kind of place where people obey the rules."
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"Prejudice plunges you into a world of fear and hate. That's no way to live."

"We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons."

"Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil."

"A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity-or none at all-with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors."

"No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure."

"Women most often experience shame as a web of layered, conflicting, and competing social-community expectations. The expectations dictate who we should be, what we should be, how we should be."

"Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. -The Subjection of Women."

"At the exact time that our society embraces shaming, blaming, judgment, and rejection, it also holds acceptance and belonging as immensely important. In other words, it's never been more impossible to 'fit in,' yet 'fitting in' has never been more important and valued."

Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermín had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That’s the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.
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."

"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."

"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 doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth."
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