« All You Quotes · Steven Pinker's Page
You Quotes by Steven Pinker
- Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying…
- Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.
- Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away…
- Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
- If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.
- No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
- One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
- Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
- The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
- You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.
- 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…
- Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So…
- A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a…
- America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of…
- Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.…
- One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most…
- People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me…
- The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis.…
- There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used…
- Why is it surprising that scientists might have long hair and wear cowboy boots? In fields like neuroscience, where the events you are recording are…
- You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body…
- The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.
More You Quotes
- Dedicate yourself to the good you deserve and desire for yourself. Give yourself peace of mind. You deserve to be happy. You… — Hannah Arendt
- These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties. — Hannah Arendt
- I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore… — Pietro Aretino
- If you want to annoy your neighbors, tell the truth about them. — Pietro Aretino
- Flattery and deceit are the darlings of great men, and so with these men spread the butter on thick, if you want… — Pietro Aretino
- Having been a child actor, I remember how directors would trick me to get good performances out of me. I don't think… — Asia Argento
- In Italy the censor is very old and there are many judges and psychiatrists who analyse you. — Dario Argento
- I do think the heart can balance out the mind, if your heart is in a good place it can give you… — Alexis Arguello
- I believe more in precision, when you have the capability, like when you see a mosquito fly and you're able to hit… — Alexis Arguello
- I'd take precision any day over power; as far as being tactical you know you have to see what's going on in… — Alexis Arguello
- Haiti, Haiti, the further I am from you, the less I breathe. Haiti, I love you, and I will love you always.… — Jean-Bertrand Aristide
- When you care about human beings, you do your best to not repress and to not let people to repress and to… — Jean-Bertrand Aristide