« All One Quotes · Steven Pinker's Page
One Quotes by Steven Pinker
- It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went…
- We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
- When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very…
- What a dull universe it would be if everything in it conformed to our expectations, if it held nothing to surprise or baffle us or…
- Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.
- In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white…
- It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig…
- Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar,…
- My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had…
- Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
- I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
- Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
- M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
- One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
- We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
- Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the…
- Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer…
- America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of…
- An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to…
- As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one…
More One Quotes
- All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. — Aristotle
- Trust is the one most important base on which the beautiful building of strong friendship can be built. — Anurag Prakash Ray
- Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake… — Hannah Arendt
- Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either… — Hannah Arendt
- No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has… — Hannah Arendt
- We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate… — Paul Auster
- A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one. — Aristotle
- Grief makes one hour ten. — William Shakespeare