Nature of man Quotes by Steven Pinker

16 Nature of man quotes by Steven Pinker

All Nature of man quotes Steven Pinker’s page

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It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and…

Steven Pinker

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“Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories…

Steven Pinker

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With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

Steven Pinker

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My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

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“I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach…

Steven Pinker

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Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not…

Steven Pinker

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Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

Steven Pinker

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The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to…

Steven Pinker

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It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that…

Steven Pinker

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“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that…

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. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not…

Steven Pinker

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the…

Steven Pinker

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“The dread of a permanently wicked human nature takes two forms. One is a practical fear: that social reform is a waste…

Steven Pinker

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“Though many of my arguments will be coolly analytical — that an acknowledgment of human nature does not, logically speaking, imply the…

Steven Pinker

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“Humans are not innately good (just as they are not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them…

Steven Pinker

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More by Steven Pinker

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. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not…

Steven Pinker

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 that their god was morally superior to those of the neighboring tribes because he demanded only that sheep and cattle be slaughtered on his behalf, not children. But the temptation must have been around, because the…

Steven Pinker

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 for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because…

Steven Pinker

“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 provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter,…

Steven Pinker