Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.
Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!
Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.
We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.
With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs.
As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.
The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.
As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.
M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.
Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.
I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.
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.
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.
I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.