Quote

I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

Steven Pinker

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Justice
Debates
Moral
Ticket
Games
Tickets
Play
Basis
Think
Bases
Thinking
Debate
Gets
Game

More quotes by Steven Pinker

Image
As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.
Steven Pinker
Image
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Steven Pinker
Image
A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
Steven Pinker
Image
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
Steven Pinker
Image
A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.
Steven Pinker
Image
With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
Steven Pinker
Image
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 person and not another, marry one person and not another.
Steven Pinker
Image
Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.
Steven Pinker
Image
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.
Steven Pinker
Image
We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
Steven Pinker
Image
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. You have to look at a higher level of organization.
Steven Pinker
Image
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 part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.
Steven Pinker
Image
Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.
Steven Pinker
Image
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, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.
Steven Pinker
Image
Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
Steven Pinker
Image
The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.
Steven Pinker
Image
As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.
Steven Pinker
Image
Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.
Steven Pinker
Image
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
Steven Pinker
Image
Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement.
Steven Pinker