A Quote by Steven Pinker

The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe. the forces that make it tick, the stuff it's made of; the origin of living things, and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of; like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

Steven Pinker

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About Achievements Allowing Art Astonishing Capable Competitiveness Cost Costs Cures Disarmament Fact Failure Forces Great Great Work History Humanity Ignorance Indifference Just Knowledge Life Like Living Living Thing Living Things Machinery Made Magnificent Make Moral Much National Nor Nurture Origin Our Philistine Policies Practical Science Shows Species Stuff The History Of Things Tick Understand Unilateral Universe Warehouse Well Work

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Steven Pinker
Canadian - Scientist
Born: September 18, 1954

But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.

Stefan Zweig

You have to make people understand that things cost something. Otherwise it seems like they have no value. I can't just be giving away rabbits. No. It costs five bucks, so make it work for you.

Novella Carpenter

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.

Malcolm Mclaren

I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

Jonathan Haidt

In spite of all these disquieting triumphs in the field of natural science, it's astonishing how little man has learned about himself, and how much there is to learn. How little we know about this brain which made social evolution possible, and of the mind. How little we know of the nature and spirit of man and God. We stand now before this inner frontier of ignorance. If we could pass it, we might well discover the meaning of life and understand man's destiny.

Wilder Penfield

For me, I think the greatest achievements of science is to allow humanity to realize that our world is comprehensible. Through science, rational thinking, we can understand how the universe works.

Jim Al-Khalili

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

Rowan Williams

Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. . . . Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially.

E. O. Wilson

The only thing I collect is art. I collect it because I like looking at it. A lot of it is really personal stuff that my friends have made, paintings that my husband's mother made, and things that I bought. I buy abstract art on eBay, and I buy some outsider art on eBay, or what is called folk art, I buy a lot of. I have a lot of professional art work as well as more stuff my friends' kids make. To have a wall of art to look at, I feel really surrounded by love, because so much of the work is related to my friendships.

Kathleen Hanna

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you're going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.

Donald Miller

I would hope with all my heart that people understand this and see it in the film. And there are also other messages in Happy Feet, like racial and environmental ones, but none of them are so overt. George has made a great story about penguins with a lot of humanity in it and audiences can follow a species we don't know that well.

Brittany Murphy

A great man, who was convinced that the truths of political and moral science are capable of the same certainty as those that form the system of physical science, even in those branches like astronomy that seem to approximate mathematical certainty. He cherished this belief, for it led to the consoling hope that humanity would inevitably make progress toward a state of happiness and improved character even as it has already done in its knowledge of the truth.

Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

The life and soul of science is its practical application, and just as the great advances in mathematics have been made through the desire of discovering the solution of problems which were of a highly practical kind in mathematical science, so in physical science many of the greatest advances that have been made from the beginning of the world to the present time have been made in the earnest desire to turn the knowledge of the properties of matter to some purpose useful to mankind.

Lord Kelvin

Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe rather than practical applications for commercial gain. But their discoveries later turned out to have great practical benefits.

Stephen Hawking

The spirit of humanity, like the forces of nature, and like the physical life, is at bottom energy.... Spiritual life, therefore, is just as much a development out of what has gone before in the evolutionary process as physical life is; which means that the origin of spiritual life is from within.

John H. Dietrich

History is not just about dates and quotations. And it's not just about politics, the military and social issues, though much of it of course is about that. It's about everything. It's about life history. It's human. And we have to see it that way. We have to teach it that way. We have to read it that way. It's about art, music, literature, money, science, love - the human experience.

David McCullough

A Quote by Steven Pinker

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