Quotes from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from 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, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from 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, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. [Robert] Trivers together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair weather friends from loyal allies. Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one s promises reducing a partner s worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Though many of my arguments will be coolly analytical — that an acknowledgment of human nature does not, logically speaking, imply the negative outcomes so many people fear — I will not try to hide my belief that they have a positive thrust as well. "Man will become better when you show him what he is like," wrote Chekhov, and so the new sciences of human nature can help lead the way to a realistic, biologically informed humanism. They expose the psychological unity of our species beneath the superficial differences of physical appearance and parochial culture. They make us appreciate the wondrous complexity of the human mind, which we are apt to take for granted precisely because it works so well. They identify the moral intuitions that we can put to work in improving our lot. They promise a naturalness in human relationships, encouraging us to treat people in terms of how they do feel rather than how some theory says they ought to feel. They offer a touchstone by which we can identify suffering and oppression wherever they occur, unmasking the rationalizations of the powerful. They give us a way to see through the designs of self-appointed social reformers who would liberate us from our pleasures. They renew our appreciation for the achievements of democracy and of the rule of law. And they enhance the insights of artists and philosophers who have reflected on the human condition for millennia.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons”
― Steven Pinker, quote from 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, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Behavioral science is not for sissies.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from 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, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves?”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes “culture,” and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western “moral thinkers,” including feminists.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“In behaviorism, an infant's talents and abilities didn't matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from psychology, together with other contents of the mind, such as ideas, beliefs, desires, and feelings. They were subjective and unmeasurable, he said, and unfit for science, which studies only objective and measurable things. To a behaviorist, the only legitimate topic for psychology is overt behavior and how it is controlled by the present and past environment. (There is an old joke in psychology: What does a behaviorist say after making love? "It was good for you; how was it for me?")”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“The conscious mind—the self or soul—is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“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, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“In many schools, teachers have been told, falsely, that there is an “opportunity zone” in which a child’s gender identification is malleable. They have used this zone to try to stamp out boyhood: banning same-sex play groups and birthday parties, forcing children to do gender-atypical activities, suspending boys who run during recess or play cops and robbers. In her book the War Against Boys, the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers rightly calls this agenda “meddlesome, abusive and quite beyond what educators in a free society are mandated to do(172).”
― Steven Pinker, quote from 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, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Journalists sometimes speculate about “brain transplants” when they really should be calling them “body transplants,” because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from 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, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“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, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“human material existence is limited by ideas, not by stuff.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

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