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Quote by Steven Pinker

“I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.”

Quote by Steven Pinker

Author

Steven Pinker is a renowned cognitive psychologist, linguist, and author. His research focuses on language, cognition, and human behavior, particularly the relationship between language and thought. Pinker is known for his in-depth research on the evolution of language and his contributions to the field of cognitive science. more

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“If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.”

Ifs Should Records Crime Policy Resources Method Notes Track Prevention Track Record

Author:Steven Pinker

“If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.”

People Ifs Life Is Literature Views Point Of View Journalism Tribes Life Is Like

Author: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.”

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Author:Steven Pinker

“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.'”

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Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Source: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.”

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Author:Steven Pinker

“It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.”

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Author:Steven Pinker

“Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.”

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Author:Steven Pinker

“Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.”

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Author:Steven Pinker

“Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.”

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Author:Steven Pinker

“My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.”

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Author:Steven Pinker