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The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

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
Human
Reflex
Humans
Reflexes
Thing
Automatically
Presence
Capacity
Compassion
Living
Another
Triggered

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.
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However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.
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The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
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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.
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But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
Steven Pinker
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As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Steven Pinker
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In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!
Steven Pinker
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All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers.
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We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.
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There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'
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I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.
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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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
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The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
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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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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I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
Steven Pinker
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If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.
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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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