Free speech Quote by Stephen Pinker

“The general valorization of reason and evidence, scrutiny of social arrangements, open discourse and a reasonable scepticism have all been very healthy developments. The attempts to push them back —from both the right and the left wing and for different reasons, but denigrating secular reason…” quote by Stephen Pinker — Download Open image

““The general valorization of reason and evidence, scrutiny of social arrangements, open discourse and a reasonable scepticism have all been very healthy developments. The attempts to push them back —from both the right and the left wing and for different reasons, but denigrating secular reason, science, objectivity, free speech—I think bring dangers.””

Stephen Pinker

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“Chomsky's writings are "classics" in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

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“The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality...[I]f we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have…

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“Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse subcultures don't always see it that way. People have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in one culture are bound to notice when their neighbors are satisfying those those desires better than they are. When they do notice, history tells us, they…

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“[C]ulture, for all its importance, is not some miasma that seeps into people through their skin. Culture relies on neural circuitry that accomplishes the feat we call learning. Those circuits do not make us indiscriminate mimics but have to work in surprisingly subtle ways to make the transmission of culture possible. That is why it is not an alternative to…

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Any kind of restrictions put on free speech would have worse consequences than bullying.

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“When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, and inaugurated the biggest crisis since the 1930s, there were no real alternatives to hand. No one had laid the groundwork. For years, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians had all firmly maintained that we’d reached the end of the age of “big narratives” and that it was time to trade in ideologies for…

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The right to free speech is important but it isn't as important as 'we're all human beings together, let's find solutions together.'

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“It struck me that there is a reason James Madison put freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the very first amendment.…

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“On the one hand, freedom of speech guarantees a lack of freedom.”

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Free speech underpins our democratic society and our universities have a long and proud history of being places where students and academics can express…

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Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

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Maybe we need a tax credit for the poorest Americans to buy a laptop. Now, maybe that's wrong, maybe that's expensive, maybe we can't…

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Free speech has a very small constituency on the modern campus, particularly if the speaker under attack is conservative.

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I think the reality is that copyright law has for a very long time been a tiny little part of American jurisprudence, far removed from traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, and that made sense before the Internet. Now there is an unavoidable link between First Amendment interests and the scope of copyright law. The legal system is recognizing for the first…

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Free speech Quote by Stephen Pinker

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