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Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.

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
Ideology
Revenge
Wars
Resources
Food
Shortages
Rather
Shortage
Water
Conquest
War
Fought

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
Steven Pinker
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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
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Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
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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Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Steven Pinker
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The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
Steven Pinker
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Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
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
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When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.
Steven Pinker
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People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
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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Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young.
Steven Pinker
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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
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Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.
Steven Pinker
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I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.
Steven Pinker
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It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.
Steven Pinker
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An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.
Steven Pinker
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As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.
Steven Pinker
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One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
Steven Pinker
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Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
Steven Pinker