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Disgust is intuitive microbiology
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
Microbiology
Disgust
Intuitive
Disgusting
More quotes by Steven Pinker
For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'
Steven Pinker
As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.
Steven Pinker
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
Steven Pinker
The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.
Steven Pinker
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
Steven Pinker
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
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
We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.
Steven Pinker
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
In the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.
Steven Pinker
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
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
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
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.
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
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
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.
Steven Pinker
In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth.
Steven Pinker
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
The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
Steven Pinker