Steven Pinker Quotes

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.
I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.
I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.
I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.
I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.
If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.
If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.
If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.
If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.
It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.
It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.
It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.
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AuthorName
Steven Pinker
Profession
Scientist
BirthDate
18 September, 1954
Country
Canada
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