The idea that children are ...

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child\'s peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
 Steven Pinker

More phrases

Being self-made is a state of mind, and once you put that mentality to work, your success will come.
 Dave East
A lot of people change for good. Some people just fall off. Just trying to progress in anything, no matter what you're doing, I feel like any progression you make... some people aren't gonna be around you that were around you.
 Dave East
We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.
 John Shelby Spong
I've always had the mentality of: work hard, get to bed early, focus - and let your work speak for itself.
 Olivia Palermo
If a warrior is to succeed at anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.

Quotes from the same author

Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy.
 Steven Pinker
But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.
 Steven Pinker
For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'
 Steven Pinker
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
 Steven Pinker
The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.
 Steven Pinker