Steven Pinker Quotations | Page 4

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

Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

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

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer a favor, who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse. And being the first to get a piece of gossip is like engaging in insider trading: You can capitalize on an opportunity before anyone else can.

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

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.

In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

By all measures men are the more violent gender.