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All Steven Pinker Quotes
My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
Steven Pinker
61% of people like this quote
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
Steven Pinker
58% of people like this quote
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
Steven Pinker
57% of people like this quote
Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.
Steven Pinker
56% of people like this quote
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
Steven Pinker
55% of people like this quote
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
Steven Pinker
54% of people like this quote
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.
Steven Pinker
53% of people like this quote
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
Steven Pinker
52% of people like this quote
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.
Steven Pinker
50% of people like this quote
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
Steven Pinker
49% of people like this quote
I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
Steven Pinker
48% of people like this quote
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?
Steven Pinker
48% of people like this quote
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Steven Pinker
46% of people like this quote
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