QUOTABLE
QUOTES
God is not the author of all things, but only of such as are good.
-Socrates,
The Republic, Book II
My belief is, not that a good body will by its own
excellence, make the soul good; but on the contrary, that a good soul will by its
excellence render the body as perfect as it can be.
-Socrates,
The Republic, Book III
The bent given by education will determine all that
follows.
-Socrates,
The Republic, Book IV
Hence the dialectic method, and that alone, adopts the following course. It carries back its hypotheses to the very first principle of all, in order to establish them firmly; and finding the eye of the soul absolutely buried in a swamp of barbarous ignorance, it gently draws and raises it upwards, employing as handmaids in this work of revolution the arts which we have discussed.
-Socrates,
The Republic, Book VII
Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons, and no government can stand which is not founded upon justice.
-Aristotle,
Politics, Book VII
For he who would learn to command well must, as men say, first of all learn to obey.
-Aristotle,
Politics, Book VII
The better the character, the better the government.
-Aristotle,
Politics, Book VIII
Leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure.
-Aristotle,
Politics, Book VIII
Happiness is an end, since all men deem it to be accompanied with pleasure and not with pain.
-Aristotle,
Politics, Book VIII
Men’s happiness or misery is [for the] most part of their own making.
-John
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, No. 1
Fear and awe ought to give you the first power over their [children’s] minds, and love and friendship in riper years to hold it.
-John
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, No. 42
Remove hope and fear, and there is an end of all discipline.
-John
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, No. 54
Children are to be treated as rational creatures.
-John
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, No. 54
You must do nothing before him, which you would not
have him imitate.
-John
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, No. 71
Curiosity in children … is but an appetite after knowledge.
-John
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, No. 118
Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man.
-Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book I
Plants are fashioned by cultivation, men by education.
-Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book I
The more children can do for themselves the less help they need from other people.
-Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book II
The surest way to make your child unhappy is to accustom him to get everything he wants.
-Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book II
Be virtuous and good yourselves, and the examples you set will impress themselves on your pupils’ memories, and in due season will enter their hearts.
-Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book II
Man is the same in all stations.
-Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book III
Man’s duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
-Immanuel
Kant, Thoughts on Education, No. 12
Intelligence divorced from judgment produces nothing but foolishness. Understanding is the knowledge of the general. Judgment is the application of the general to the particular. Reason is the power of understanding the connection between the general and the particular.
-Immanuel
Kant, Thoughts on Education, No. 68
Punishments inflicted with signs of anger are
useless.
-Immanuel
Kant, Thoughts on Education, No. 85
It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence.
-William
James, Pragmatism, Lecture II
New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.
-William
James, Pragmatism, Lecture II
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
-William
James, Pragmatism, Lecture II
The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property
inherent in it. Truth happens to
an idea. It becomes true, is made
true by events.
-William
James, Pragmatism, Lecture VI
The ‘absolutely’ true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge.
-William
James, Pragmatism, Lecture VI
If it can make no practical difference whether a given statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning.
-William
James, The Meaning of Truth, III
Education, in its larger sense, is one of the most inexhaustible of all topics.
-John
Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews
Whatever helps to shape the human being—to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not—is part of his education.
-John
Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews
What professional men should carry away with them
from a University, is not professional knowledge, but that which should direct
the use of their professional knowledge, and bring the light of general culture
to illuminate the technicalities of a special pursuit.
-John
Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews
Can anything deserve the name of a good education
which does not include literature and science too? If there were no more to be said than that scientific education
teaches us to think, and literary education to express our thoughts, do we not
require both?
-John
Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews
Experience proves that there is no one study or
pursuit, which, practised to the exclusion of all others, does not narrow and
pervert the mind; breeding in it a class of prejudices special to that pursuit,
besides a general prejudice, common to all narrow specialities, against large
views, from an incapacity to take in and appreciate the grounds of them.
-John
Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews
It is not the utmost limit of human acquirement to
know only one thing, but to combine a minute knowledge of one or a few things
with a general knowledge of many things.
-John
Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews
The most incessant occupation of the human intellect
throughout life is the ascertainment of truth.
-John
Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews
It is mathematics, again, that we owe our first
notion of a connected body of truth; truths which grow out of one another, and
hang together so that each implies all the rest; that no one of them can be
questioned without contradicting another or others, until in the end it appears
that no part of the system can be false unless the whole is so.
-John
Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews
A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.
-Alfred
North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Chapter I
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge.
-Alfred
North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Chapter I
The pupil’s mind is a growing organism.
-Alfred
North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Chapter III
To possess all the world of knowledge and lose one’s own self is as awful a fate in education as in religion.
-John
Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum
Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought.
-John
Dewey, Democracy and Education
Mind is capacity to refer present conditions to
future results, and future consequences to present conditions.
-John
Dewey, Democracy and Education
To have an aim is to act with meaning.
-John
Dewey, Democracy and Education
Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from
the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed
course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the
pupil’s mind and the subject matter.
-John
Dewey, Democracy and Education
There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools
there is usually both too much and too little information supplied by others.
-John
Dewey, Democracy and Education
What we want and need is education pure and simple,
and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding
out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order
that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan.
-John
Dewey, Experience and Education
To be intellectually responsible is to consider the
consequences of a projected step; it means to be willing to adopt these
consequences when they follow reasonably from any position already taken. Intellectual responsibility secures
integrity; that is to say, consistency and harmony in belief.
-John
Dewey, How We Think
It is not the case that teaching necessarily implies learning. What teaching implies is merely the intention to bring about learning.
-Paul
H. Hirst, “What is Teaching?”
It is as much a logical absurdity to say ‘One teaches children not subjects’ as it is to say ‘One teaches subjects not children’.
-Paul
H. Hirst, “What is Teaching?”
When you kill the individual you also kill the person.
-Jacques
Maritain, Education at the Crossroads
The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.
-Nel
Noddings, Caring
Though it is prima facie wrong to tell a lie, other moral claims may override the demand to tell the truth.
-Gareth
B. Matthews, The Philosophy of Childhood
Each of us is, I am sure, entirely unique [but] that does not mean that we have spontaneous capacities…We have to behave in a way that is determined by our genetic and personal history.
-B.
F. Skinner, in Learning and Intelligence: Conversations with B. F. Skinner
and R. H. Wheeler
Education is an important function of a culture—possibly in the long run its most important or only function.
-B. F.
Skinner, “Some Implications of Making Education More Efficient”
University culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images.
-Mark
Edmunson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”
The ad is of little consequence in itself, but
expand its message exponentially and you have the central thrust of current
consumer culture—buy in order to be.
-Mark
Edmunson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”
“Offensive” is the preferred term of repugnance
today, just as “enjoyable” is the summit of praise.
-Mark
Edmunson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”
Students, alas, usually lack the confidence to acknowledge what would be their most precious asset for learning: their ignorance.
-Mark
Edmunson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”
Moving specialized scholarship toward general understanding is one primary task of the teacher. And if specialized scholarship is to be illuminated by, and useful in, the wider world of ideas and things, than the scholar needs range.
-Kenneth
E. Eble, The Craft of Teaching
Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.
-Parker
J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach
Our inner world has a reality and a power that can keep us from being victims of circumstance and compel us to take responsibility for our own lives.
-Parker
J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach
Education is the attempt to “lead out” from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth, not by external norms but by reasoned and reflective self-determination.
-Parker
J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach
Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.
-Parker
J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach
Institutions of higher learning should not be legalistic in tone or litigious in practice.
-Robert
Audi, “On the Ethics of Teaching and the Ideals of Learning”
There are two truisms that must be balanced both in education and in understanding the world: one is that everything is different from everything else; the other is that, in some way, everything is similar to everything else.
-Robert
Audi, “On the Ethics of Teaching and the Ideals of Learning”
Teachers should have something to say; it should be worth saying; and it should be said well.
-Robert
Audi, “On the Ethics of Teaching and the Ideals of Learning”
How we choose to believe and speak and treat others, how we choose a civic role for ourselves, is the deepest purpose of a liberal education and of the act of teaching.
-A.
Bartlett Giamatti, “To Make Oneself Eternal”
Sexual harassment is to America’s contemporary college system what atheism was to Shakespeare’s England: the charge you throw at whomever you want to hurt when you can’t think of anything else.
-Cristina
Nehring, “The Higher Yearning”
Despite its dangers, “love” is for me the only word that captures my deepest sense of what it means to desire for other persons not what they may want, but what is best for them, measured by the distance between what they are and what they might become.
-Marshall
Gregory, “Pedagogy and the Three Loves”
Learning is no more than a sector of cognitive development that is facilitated by experience.
-Jean
Piaget, “Piaget’s Theory”
As for teaching children concepts that they have not already acquired in their spontaneous development, it is completely useless.
-Jean
Piaget, “A Conversation with Jean Piaget”
Voluntary activity, more than highly developed intellect, distinguishes humans from the animals which stand closest to them.
-L.
S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society
What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone.
-L.
S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society
The only “good learning” is that which is in advance
of development.
-L.
S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society
Development, according to a well-known definition, is precisely the struggle of opposites.
-L.
S. Vygotsky, The Fundamentals of Defectology
Through others, we become ourselves.
-L.
S. Vygotsky, The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions
Where an intelligent grasp of principles requires a knowledge of mathematics, its fundamental ideas should be presented in such a way that students carry away the sense of mathematics not only as a tool for the solution of problems but as a study of types of order, system, and language.
-Sidney
Hook, “Education for Modern Man”
Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and
consequences of human values.
-Sidney
Hook, “Education for Modern Man”
Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical
survey of existence from the standpoint of value.
-Sidney
Hook, “Education for Modern Man”
It is important to remember that the decision of what to make the basics of education, like every major curriculum decision, depends not simply on the way the world is but on the way we think it should be, on the kind of life we believe to be worth living, and on the kind of society we believe to be worth living in.
-Jane
Roland Martin, “Two Dogmas of Curriculum”
Poverty, hopelessness, the disruption of families and communities, the ubiquity of media images all make it difficult to place new things against a past too often made to appear a past of victimization, shadows, and shame.
-Maxine
Greene, “The Passions of Pluralism: Multiculturalism and the Expanding
Community”
To say that there really are objective values out there, that there is a moral reality to be corresponded with, seems as pointless as saying that God is on our side. The two remarks are only stylistically different. Unless we have some idea how to test for this correspondence, or how to test for Divine approval, nothing has been gained by the insistence.
-Richard
M. Rorty, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching”
The fact that a view is ours—our language’s, our tradition’s, our culture’s is an excellent prima facie reason for holding it.
-Richard
M. Rorty, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching”
I do not know of any intellectual tradition that is as savagely self-critical as the Western tradition.
-John
R. Searle, “Traditionalists and Their Challengers”
It’s no use getting rid of the hegemony of dead white males in the curriculum if the faculty that teaches the multicultural curriculum is still mostly living white males.
-John
R. Searle, “Traditionalists and Their Challengers”
The idea that there might be some objective
standards of what is good and what is bad, that you might be able to show that
Shakespeare is better that Mickey Mouse, for example, threatens the concept
that all cultures are equal.
-John
R. Searle, “Traditionalists and Their Challengers”
As our disciplines have become more specialized, as
we have lost faith in the ideal of an integrated undergraduate education, we
simply provide the student with the familiar cafeteria of courses and hope
thing turn out for the best. The
problem with the traditionalists’ ideology is not that it is false but that it
has run out of gas.
-John R. Searle, “Traditionalists and Their Challengers”
Through common readings and the exchange of ideas, the core courses help students learn to think for themselves and express themselves. The curriculum promotes a shared discourse, that in an age of inescapable specialization, bridges the disciplines and sustains communication among educated persons. “Core,” then, refers not just to content or canon, but to process and method.
-Wm.
Theodore de Bary, “Asia in the Core Curriculum”
No matter how well our translators do their work, studying another culture is much like learning another language. The stranger the culture, the less accessible it will be, and the greater the risks of misunderstanding and superficiality.
-Wm.
Theodore de Bary, “Asia in the Core Curriculum”
In the study of other cultures or civilizations, an understanding of one’s own situation and one’s own past is a precondition for understanding another’s.
-Wm.
Theodore de Bary, “Asia in the Core Curriculum”
For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply “blah, blah, blah,” and practice, pure activism.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
There is, in fact, no teaching without learning. One requires the other.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
The educator with a democratic vision or posture
cannot avoid in his teaching praxis insisting on the critical capacity,
curiosity, and autonomy of the learner.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
Curiosity as restless questioning, as movement
toward the revelation of something hidden, as a question verbalized or not, as
search for clarity, as a moment of attention, suggestion, and vigilance,
constitutes an integral part of the phenomenon of being alive. There could be no creativity without the
curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we
did not make, to add to it something of our own making.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
To educate is essentially to form.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
Human existence is, in fact, a radical and profound
tension between good and evil, between dignity and indignity, between decency
and indecency, between the beauty and the ugliness of the world.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
The future is something to be constructed through
trial and error rather than an inexorable vice that determines all our actions.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
Education does not make us educable. It is our awareness of being unfinished that
makes us educable.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
Mere mechanical memorization of the superficial aspects of the object is not true learning.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
This is the road I have tried to follow as a teacher: living my convictions; being open to the process of knowing and sensitive to the experience of teaching as an art; being pushed forward by the challenges that prevent me form bureaucratizing my practice; accepting my limitations, yet always conscious of the necessary effort to overcome them and aware that I cannot hide them because to do so would be a failure to respect both my students and myself as a teacher.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
It is not possible to have authority without freedom
or vice versa.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
My role as a “progressive” teacher is not only that
of teaching mathematics or biology but also of helping the students to
recognize themselves as the architects of their own cognition process.
-Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
We need to be much clearer about what we do and do not know so that we don’t continually confuse the two. If I could have one wish for education, it would be the systematic ordering of our basic knowledge in such a way that what is known and true can be acted on, while what is superstition, fad, and myth can be recognized as such and used only when there is nothing else to support us in our frustration and despair.
-Benjamin
S. Bloom, “Innocence in Education”
What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.
-Benjamin
S. Bloom, Developing Talent in Young People
Learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting and always dependent upon the utilization of cultural resources.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Education is a major embodiment of a culture’s way of life, not just a preparation for it.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Nothing is “culture free,” but neither are individuals simply mirrors of their culture. It is the interaction between them that both gives a communal cast to individual thought and imposes a certain unpredictable richness on any culture’s way life, thought, or feeling.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
“Thinking about thinking” has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Education is too consequential to too many
constituencies to leave to professional educators.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Education is risky, for it fuels the sense of
possibility.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
In theorizing about the practice of education in the classroom (or any other setting, for that matter), you had better take into account the folk theories that those engaged in teaching and learning already have. For any innovations that you, as a “proper” pedagogical theorist, may wish to introduce will have to compete with, replace, or otherwise modify the folk theories that already guide both teachers and pupils.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Knowledge, after all, is justified belief.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
For a choice of pedagogy inevitably communicates a
conception of the learning process and the learner. Pedagogy is never innocent.
It is a medium that carries its own message.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
You cannot teacher-proof a curriculum any more that
you can parent-proof a family.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Bad narrative interpretation in high places is poison.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
The objective of skilled agency and collaboration in the study of the human condition is to achieve not unanimity, but more consciousness. And more consciousness always implies more diversity.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
We need a surer sense of what to teach to whom and
how to go about teaching it in such a way that it will make those taught more
effective, less alienated, and better human beings.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Learning to be a scientist is not the same as
“learning science.”
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Mind is an extension of the hands and tools that you
use and of the jobs to which you apply them.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.
-Jerome
Bruner, The Culture of Education
To sneer at the power of culture to shape man’s mind
and to abandon our efforts to bring this power under human control is to commit
moral suicide.
-Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education
Good and evil are asymmetrical; there are more ways to harm people than to help them, and harmful acts can hurt them to a greater degree than virtuous acts can make them better off.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Philosophy today gets no respect.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Making correct predictions in pursuit of a goal is a
pretty good definition of “intelligence.”
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Something in the mind must be innate.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
It is the mind, not behavior, that is lawful.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Many intellectuals tout the small numbers of battlefield casualties in pre-state societies as evidence that primitive warfare is largely ritualistic. They do not notice that two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Surely it is unnecessary to paint a false picture of a people as peaceable and ecologically conscientious in order to condemn the great crimes against them, as if genocide were wrong only when the victims are nice guys.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Culture, then, is a pool of technological and social innovations that people accumulate to help them live their lives, not a collection of arbitrary roles and symbols that happen to befall them.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
The “culture” of any of the conquering nations of Europe…is in fact a greatest-hits collection of inventions assembled across thousands of miles and years.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Nothing comes out of nothing.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
There are always an infinite number of generalizations that a learner can draw from a finite set of inputs.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
The abundant evidence that we share a human nature
does not mean that the differences among individuals, races, or sexes
are also in our nature.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
People are qualitatively the same but may differ
quantitatively. The quantitative
differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater
extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between
ethnic groups or races.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive information about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or gender.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and some parts of cognitive neuroscience are widely seen as falling on the political right, which in a modern university is about the worst thing you can say about something.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
The goal of a peaceful and prosperous society is to minimize the use of dominance, which leads to violence and waste, and to maximize the use of reciprocity, which leads to gains in trade that make everyone better off.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Schoolchildren are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups
of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle individuals should not
be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
To criticize a particular feminist proposal is not to attack feminism in general.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
The fact that rape has something to do with violence does not mean it has nothing to do with sex, any more than the fact that armed robbery has something to do with violence means it has nothing to do with greed.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
As long as the heritability of talents and tastes is not zero, none of us has any way of knowing whether a trait has been influenced by our genes, our childhood experiences, both, or neither.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
The worst fallout from the Blank Slate is not that
people misunderstand the effects of the genes.
It is that they misunderstand the effects of the environment.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
Much of the advice from the parenting experts is flapdoodle.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate
It’s not all in the genes, but what isn’t in the genes isn’t from the parents either.
-Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate