Steven Pinker Quotes & Sayings (Page 6)

“Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.”

“If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.”

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

“Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.”

“I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.”

“Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.”

“No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.”

“Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.”

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

“My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance.”