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I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.

Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Metaphor
Asks
Write
Ever
Writing
Going
Life
Hockey
Like
Ice

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
Steven Pinker
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Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.
Steven Pinker
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Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.
Steven Pinker
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Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
Steven Pinker
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There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
Steven Pinker
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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
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One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land.
Steven Pinker
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I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.
Steven Pinker
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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
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No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
Steven Pinker
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Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak they just do. But reading is different.
Steven Pinker
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Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe.
Steven Pinker
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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 and so on.
Steven Pinker
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In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
Steven Pinker
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All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
Steven Pinker
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Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.
Steven Pinker
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The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.
Steven Pinker
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The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal.
Steven Pinker
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It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.
Steven Pinker
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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 the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.
Steven Pinker