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Quote by Jonah Lehrer

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Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer is an American author known for his insightful exploration of the brain, psychology, and culture. His work delves into the mysteries of human thought and creativity, examining how these concepts shape our daily lives. more

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“The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”

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Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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“When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.”

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Book:The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
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“The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.”

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Book:The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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