"When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery……" — Steven Pinker
"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 fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology."
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Steven Pinker
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More Alien Quotes
This quote is filed under Alien Quotes,
one of 539 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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In a land of immigrants, one was not an alien but simply the latest arrival.
— Rudolf Arnheim
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I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages…
— Russell Baker
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Alien - an American sovereign in his probationary state.
— Ambrose Bierce
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Everyone's quick to blame the alien.
— Aeschylus
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I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.
— Orson Scott Card
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Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.
— Julian Casablancas
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The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all…
— Noam Chomsky
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There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books…
— Sandra Cisneros
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I feel... sexier, I think, with short hair. I feel like an alien!
— Pamela Anderson
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The tabloids, instead of being about alien babies and stuff, it's my triplets, quadruplets, marriages, feuds.
— Jennifer Aniston
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Wide open and unguarded stand our gates And through them presses a wild motley throng Men from the Volga and…
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents.
— James Madison
See all 539 Alien Quotes »