Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
the mind is a neural computer
Fiction is empathy technology.
My laptop has freed me to travel.
Disgust is intuitive microbiology
The world has far too much morality.
By all measures men are the more violent gender.
Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.
I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.
Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.
Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.
Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.
Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless
Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.
We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.
We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.
All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.
Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.
Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution
It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.
If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.
The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.
[Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies.
But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.
Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.
We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.
Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
... people notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning.
A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.
Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.
If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.
Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.