Believe Quotes by Steven Pinker

16 Believe quotes by Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker’s reflections on belief are grounded in data and optimism. In these 16 concise statements you’ll see a rational yet hopeful perspective that ties human progress to reason and empirical insight.

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All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic…

Steven Pinker

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You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

Steven Pinker

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Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before…

Steven Pinker

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As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats…

Steven Pinker

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Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from…

Steven Pinker

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As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to…

Steven Pinker

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I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher,…

Steven Pinker

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Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that…

Steven Pinker

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Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the…

Steven Pinker

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In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine…

Steven Pinker

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If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral…

Steven Pinker

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A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic:…

Steven Pinker

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But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe…

Steven Pinker

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Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about…

Steven Pinker

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Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the…

Steven Pinker

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Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best…

Steven Pinker

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Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much…

Steven Pinker

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Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.

Steven Pinker

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The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by…

Steven Pinker

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I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless…

Steven Pinker

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As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

Steven Pinker

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Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely…

Steven Pinker

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When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock.…

Steven Pinker

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Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives…

Steven Pinker

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“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted…

Steven Pinker

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Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,…

Steven Pinker

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In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award…

Steven Pinker

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“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to…

Steven Pinker

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If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or…

Steven Pinker

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“In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch.…

Steven Pinker

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Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from…

Steven Pinker

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