Canadian - Scientist | September 18, 1954 -
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.
Steven Pinker
I AmLookBackI CanWatchingWhere
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.
ChangeTogetherReligionViolence
It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.
MindSocietySingleMisleadingWere
I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs.
FocusEnergyLong-TermRatherThan
Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.
LifeLiveChildrenPeopleAlcohol
Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy.
PeopleMediaKnowWhyWillEvents
Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.
WomenWayEmpowerWomen AreViolent
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.
TechnologyThoughtsWorldReading
Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.
CultureLanguageLearnWillRaceUp
Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today's Republican party, just as the two Georges - the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern - found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972.
TodayChristianPartyEnemyStrange
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
ImpactMindsHighLeftOurRelative
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.
MemoryMeResearchLanguageDoing
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