"Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old……" — Steven Pinker

"Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain."

— Steven Pinker

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248 Quotes by Steven Pinker

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More Adapted Quotes

This quote is filed under Adapted Quotes, one of 162 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:

Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is… — Samuel Butler
There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites. — Stokely Carmichael
Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred… — Herbert Spencer
During cycles long anterior to the creation of the human race, and while the surface of the globe was passing… — Roderick Murchison
The world has a way of undermining complex plans. This is particularly true in fast moving environments. A fast moving… — Carl von Clausewitz
A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The… — Elias Canetti
In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought… — John B. S. Haldane
[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily… — John Maynard Keynes
The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science.… — Thomas Kuhn
Why was this heart of mine formed with so much sensibility! Or why not my fortune adapted to its impulses!… — Oliver Goldsmith
Each of us lives within the universe - the prison - of his own brain. Projecting from it are millions… — Unknown Author
Man is a creature adapted for life under circumstances which are very narrowly limited. A few degrees of temperature more… — Robert Stawell Ball

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