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Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't believe in reason.

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
Use
Miracle
Lost
Argument
Negotiable
Reason
Case
Exclude
Trying
Cases
Realm
Believe
Already
Argue
Way
Belief
Realms
Make
Knowledge
Arguing
People
Faith
Using

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.
Steven Pinker
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If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
Steven Pinker
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The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.
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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Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.
Steven Pinker
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Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.
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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The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.
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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The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
Steven Pinker
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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
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I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
Steven Pinker
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Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.
Steven Pinker
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Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak they just do. But reading is different.
Steven Pinker
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Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless
Steven Pinker
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A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.
Steven Pinker
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As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.
Steven Pinker
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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
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My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
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