Quote

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?

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
Living
Fleas
Infection
Tick
Dry
Miserable
Infections
Hungry
Primate
Warm
Ticks
Heaven
Primates

More quotes by Steven Pinker

Image
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
Image
Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.
Steven Pinker
Image
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
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
The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
Steven Pinker
Image
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
Steven Pinker
Image
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
Steven Pinker
Image
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.
Steven Pinker
Image
In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods.
Steven Pinker
Image
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
Steven Pinker
Image
Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.
Steven Pinker
Image
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
Image
Disgust is intuitive microbiology
Steven Pinker
Image
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
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
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
Image
Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.
Steven Pinker
Image
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
Steven Pinker
Image
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
Image
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