Quotes About Steven Pinker

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

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.

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

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.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Abundance: The Future is Better Than you Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.

Steven Pinker dristar sig till och med till att hävda att högre intelligens leder till mer klassiskt liberala attityder, som individualism och frihet framför tradition, auktoritet och kollektivism.

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'

Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth.

Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war.

These 'anthropologists of peace' (who in fact are rather aggressive academics - the ethologist Johan van der Dennen calls them the Peace and Harmony Mafia.

The two deepest questions about the mind are "What makes intelligence possible?" and "What makes consciousness possible?

nonstate conflicts kill far fewer people than conflicts that involve a government, perhaps a quarter as many. Again, this is not surprising, since goverments almost by definition are in the violence business.

I believe that journalists have not given enough thought to the way that media coverage can activate our cognitive biases and distort our understanding.

And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us.

of this, to repeat, means that nuclear terrorism is impossible, only that it is not, as so many people insist, imminent, inevitable, or highly probable.

From their position of weakness, Harari notes, what terrorists seek to accomplish is not damage but theater.

And tellingly, the number of libertarian paradises in the world—developed countries without substantial social spending—is zero.

The first is that we (and the hypothetical child we have been imagining) have framed the rule too broadly.

The observation that conflict is part of the human condition, banal though it is, contradicts fashionable beliefs.

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.

Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease, feeding the hungry, saving the lives of infants and mothers, and allowing women to control their fertility.

Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

As we saw in chapter 3, one way the early modern Europeans used Odyssean self-control was to keep sharp knives out of reach at the dinner table.