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Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.
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
Produce
Necessarily
Scarcity
Change
Misery
Governance
Without
Climate
Resource
Large
Armed
Conflict
Scale
Waste
Leading
Resources
Scales
Depends
Ideology
More quotes by Steven Pinker
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
People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like.
Steven Pinker
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
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
People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.
Steven Pinker
There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.
Steven Pinker
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.
Steven Pinker
Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.
Steven Pinker
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
A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.
Steven Pinker
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
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.
Steven Pinker
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
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?'
Steven Pinker
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
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
Steven Pinker
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
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
Steven Pinker
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
Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.
Steven Pinker
