Quotes by Steven Pinker

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

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.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

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.

Ive never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you cant understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, No, because its an oblate spheroid. They suffer from the curse of knowledge: the inability to imagine what its like not to know something that they know.

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.

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone elses thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that persons vantage point.

Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

The decline of violence isnt a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.