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The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.

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
Moral
Copies
Happiness
Designed
Values
Forces
Rather
Emotions
Vestiges
Force
Built
Propagate
Past
Emotion
Untamed
Problem
Animal
Promote
Wisdom
Genes

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.
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Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.
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One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
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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.
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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
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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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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.
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Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.
Steven Pinker
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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
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If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
Steven Pinker
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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
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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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Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
Steven Pinker
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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
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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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Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
Steven Pinker
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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
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For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.
Steven Pinker
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I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.
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