Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. – Steven Pinker
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. – Steven Pinker
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. – Steven Pinker
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. – Steven Pinker
I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing. – Anne Lamott
It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. – Lewis Thomas