The blank slate Quotes
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“If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied.”
Steven Pinker
“The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.”
Steven Pinker“The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature“Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature“They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being.”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature“Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature“Behavioral science is not for sissies.”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature“Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature“As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature“The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.”
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human NatureAll in One Creative & Marketing Platform to tell stories at scale
