The Blank Slate Quotes

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate ... is a totalitarian's dream. ~ Steven Pinker

Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. ~ Leah Price

We are curious creatures, we Taiwanese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate. ~ Shawna Yang Ryan

If [t]he mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, selfrespect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are "biological" but that thinking and decision making are something else. ~ Steven Pinker

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. ~ Steven Pinker

In The Blank Slate I argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature - the doctrine of the Noble Savage - was a reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ~ Steven Pinker

I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton. ~ Charles Lamb

I'm not giving the president a blank check, period. ~ Jim McDermott

Western culture prefers us not to believe we're defined or limited. It wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility; that we're all born with the same suite of potential abilities, as neural 'blank slates', as if all human brains come off the production line at Foxconn. This seduces us into accepting the cultural lie that says we can do anything we set our minds to, that we can be whoever we want to be. This false idea is of immense value to our neoliberal economy. The game it compels us to play can best be justified morally if all the contestants start out with an equal shot at winning. Moreover, if we believe we're all the same, this legitimizes calls for deregulated corporation and smaller government: it means that men and women who lose simply didn't want it badly enough, that they just didn't believe - in which case, why should anyone else catch their fall? ~ Will Storr

At twelve o'clock, when Aureli-ano, José had bled to death and Carmelita Montiel found that the cards showing her future were blank, more than four hundred men had filed past the theater and discharged their revolvers into the abandoned body of Captain Aquiles Ricardo. A patrol had to use a wheelbarrow to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell apart like a water-soaked loaf of bread. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You're standing in the middle of a blank piece of paper. Unleash your inner architect and design your path to success. Get wild, be creative, and don't get distracted by the flow of traffic.
Traffic sucks anyway. ~ Lilly Singh

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it. ~ Daniel Boulud

They say that life is just a blank chain, and precious moments are the beads we hang off it to make it beautiful. ~ Holly Smale

The fork was invented sometime in the fifteenth century, I believe."
"Really?" she asked. "Were you there?"
His features blank, he looked up and asked, "What, for the invention of the fork or the fifteenth century? ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The blank page is God's way of letting us know how hard it is to be God. ~ G.K. Chesterton

All conversation had stopped. Following the guests' collective gazes, Cam saw something - a lizard? - wriggling and slithering its way past sauceboats and salt cellars. Without hesitation he reached out and captured the small creature, cupping it in closed hands. The lizard squirmed furiously in the space between his closed palms.
"I've got it," he said mildly.
The vicar's wife half fainted, slumping back in her chair with a low moan.
"Don't hurt him!" Beatrix Hathaway called out anxiously. "He's a family pet!"
The assembled guests glanced from Cam's closed hands to the Hathaway girl's apologetic face.
"A pet?… What a relief," Lady Westcliff said calmly, staring down the length of the table at her husband's blank countenance. "I thought it was some new English delicacy we were serving."
A swift wash of color darkened Westcliff's face, and he looked away from her with fierce concentration. To anyone who knew him well, it was obvious he was struggling not to laugh. ~ Lisa Kleypas

It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of humankind to even attempt to function responsibly. ~ Jojo Moyes

In order to cope with death, you need the correct punctuation. Not a final period, not a comma as on Aleya, but a chance to fill in the blank--- life, 'dot dot dot'. ~ Mandy Ashcraft

Only the blank page needs no editing. ~ Marty Rubin

Entirely out of patience, Dr Caldwell reaches out her hand to pick up the scalpel again. But right then, something happens that makes her stop. Two things, really. The first is an explosion, loud enough to make the windows rattle in their frames. The second is an ear-splitting scream, like a hundred people shrieking all at the same time. Dr Selkirk's face looks first blank, then terrified. "That's general evacuation," she says. "Isn't it? Isn't that the evacuation siren?" Dr Caldwell doesn't waste time answering her. She crosses to the window and hauls up the blinds. Melanie ~ M.R. Carey

As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do. ~ Jake Owen

Now standing in one corner of a boxing ring with a .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol, shooting a bullet weighing only 40 grains and with a striking energy of 51 foot pounds at 25 feet from the muzzle, I will guarantee to kill either Gene Tunney or Joe Louis before they get to me from the opposite corner. This is the smallest caliber pistol cartridge made; but it is also one of the most accurate and easy to hit with, since the pistol has no recoil. I have killed many horses with it, cripples and bear baits, with a single shot, and what will kill a horse will kill a man. I have hit six dueling silhouettes in the head with it at regulation distance in five seconds. It was this type of pistol that Millen boys' colleague, Abe Faber, did all his killings with. Yet this same pistol bullet fired at point blank range will not dent a grizzly's skull, and to shoot a grizzly with a .22 caliber pistol would simply be one way of committing suicide ~ Ernest Hemingway,

For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

I thought about packing my bags, I thought about jumping out a window, I sat on the bed and thought, I thought about you. What kind of food did you life, what was your favorite song, who was the first girl you kissed, and where, and how, I'm running out of room, I want an infinitely long blank book and forever. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Everybody made faces around here. Human beings, she discovered, could not maintain the stony, frozen expressions of the merfolk, not for an instant. There was not a moment where their faces remained blank. There was always a light in their eye, and the light, like red wind, would flare into a raging fire without notice. ~ Esther Dalseno

Your life is your artwork and you are to paint life as a beautiful struggle. With your brush, paint the colors of joy in vibrant shades of red. Color the sky a baby blue, a color as free as your heart. With rich, earthy tones shade the valleys that run deep into the ground where heaven meets hell. Life is as chaotic as the color black, a blend of all colors, and this makes life a beautiful struggle. Be grateful for the green that makes up the beautiful canvas, for nature has given you everything that you need to be happy. Most of all, don't ever feel the need to fill the entire canvas with paint, for the places left blank are the most honest expressions of who you are. ~ Forrest Curran

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that. ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

What is it about the blank page that makes me want to hurl myself into a game of solitaire? I ask myself these kinds of questions while I'm playing solitaire. ~ Jennifer Gilmore

I know that everyone in this room, Bernie Fain included, thinks I'm some kind of a nut with my so-called fixation on this vampire thing. OK, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he only thinks he is. But there are things here that can't be explained away by so-called common sense. Not even Bernie's report can explain some of them.

'I was at the hospital yesterday.' I looked directly at Butcher. 'Your own people fired maybe fifty or sixty rounds at him, some at point-blank range. How come this man never even slowed down? How come a man seventy years old can outrun police cars for more than fifteen blocks? How come when he gets clubbed on the head he doesn't bleed like other people? Look at these photos! There's a gash on his forehead... and whatever is trickling down from the cut is clear... it isn't blood.

'How come three great, big, burly hospital orderlies weighing an estimated total of nearly seven-hundred fifty pounds couldn't bring one, skinny one-hundred sixty pound man to his knees? How come an ex-boxer, a light-heavyweight not long out of the ring, couldn't even faze him with his best punch, a right hook that should have broken his jaw?

'Face it. Whether it's science, witchcraft or black magic, this character has got something going for him you don't know anything about. He doesn't seem to feel pain. Or get winded. And he doesn't seem to be very frightened by guns, or discouraged by your efforts to trap him.

'Look at these photos! Look ~ Jeff Rice

I love my job here. I appreciate all your support with my efforts, and it's been exciting to see the results. As you know, business is up twenty percent over last year at this time [hand her the memo sheet now]. I'd like you to consider changing my title to [fill in the blank] and taking my salary up to [fill in blank]. I'd really like to show you what I could do in this new role. ~ Kate White

On acting to daughter Isabella Rossellini: Keep it simple. Make a blank face and the music and the story will fill it in. ~ Ingrid Bergman

Picture to yourself the most beautiful girl imaginable! She was so beautiful that there would be no point, in view of my meagre talent for storytelling, in even trying to put her beauty into words. That would far exceed my capabilities, so I'll refrain from mentioning whether she was a blonde or a brunette or a redhead, or whether her hair was long or short or curly or smooth as silk. I shall also refrain from the usual comparisons where her complexion was concerned, for instance milk, velvet, satin, peaches and cream, honey or ivory, Instead, I shall leave it entirely up to your imagination to fill in this blank with your own ideal of feminine beauty. ~ Walter Moers

The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories ... They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's. ~ George Gilder

Her poetry is written on the ghost of trees, whispered on the lips of lovers.
As a little girl, she would drift in and out of libraries filled with dead poets and their musky scent. She held them in her hands and breathed them in
wanting so much to be part of their world ...
It was on her sixteenth birthday that she first fell in love. With a boy who brought her red roses and white lies. When he broke her heart, she cried for days.
Then hopeful, she sat with a pen in her hand, poised over the blank white sheet, but it refused to draw blood ...
She learned too late that poets are among the damned, cursed to commiserate over their loss, to reach with outstretched hands
hands that will never know the weight of what they seek. ~ Lang Leav

You see," she interrupted his blank stare, "it doesn't take much effort to be kind. It only takes the ability to recognize where kindness is needed. ~ Stephen Reid Andrews

In the other room Rateau was looking at the canvas, completely blank, in the center of which Jonas had merely written in very small letters a word that could be made out, but without any certainty as to whether it should be read solitary or solidary. ~ Albert Camus

You slogged from the terrifying emptiness of the blank page to the two most beautiful words in a writer's vocabulary: The End. ~ Lisa Cron

The problem with a plan is that you fill up the blank page of a new day with a 'to-do' list before you get there. And if you're not careful there's no room for anything else.
A plan, especially a very focused one, narrows down the possibilies of the future to just a couple of things: that things either go to plan, or they don't. ~ John C. Parkin

I know why you picked that movie,' he told her. Annie smiled and said, 'It fits our life in a few ways, I guess.' Buster pointed at the screen, which was now blank. 'It shows you that you have to stay vigilant to find a missing person, even when people tell you not to, that it's possible to bring them back from the dead.' Annie shook her head. 'I picked it because it shows that after you bring someone back from the dead, you get to kill them yourself. ~ Kevin Wilson

Money alone is only a mean; it presupposes a man to use it. The rich man can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere. He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither patience to read nor intelligence to see ... The purse may be full and the heart empty. He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him ... he may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

We'll take up where we left off, Esther', she had said, with her sweet martyr's smile. 'We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.'
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything. ~ Sylvia Plath

Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, 'You can't do a thing'. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of `you can't' once and for all. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

You can have computer sights of anything you like, but I think you have to go to the enemy on the shortest distance and knock him down from point-blank range. You'll get him from in close. At long distance, it's questionable. ~ Erich Hartmann

...he returned to his barricaded silence, locking me out of his world. The unfathomable, inscrutable East, I thought. I was cut adrift from the shores of understanding. The sea spread itself before me, leading to a blank, blank horizon. ~ Tash Aw

You don't know what inspires you. You like to think you know what inspires you, but in the final analysis I don't think you really do. It's great to look at a blank sheet of paper, you know, and walk up to an instrument and not know what's gonna happen. It's the most challenging thing I do. ~ Bob Seger

Tommy looked blank. "What's a flashlight?"
"You don't have flashlights?" Jessup said. "Jeeze! A cylinder, like, with batteries inside it, and a light bulb behind glass at one end
"
Tommy's blue eyes glinted dangerously. "We have a thing in Scotland that's a cylinder too. Very thin, made of wood, with graphite in the center. We call it a pencil."
Jessup hooted. "You think we don't have pencils?"
"You think we don't have flashlights?" Tommy snapped. "That's just American dialect. In the English language they're called torches."
Emily said mildly, "Actually we're Canadians. ~ Susan Cooper

But let me begin with a statement of my own passionate and indignant belief
I do not care one goddamned thing about how James Dickey conducted his personal life. I care everything about what this man wrote on blank sheets of paper when he sat alone probing the extremities of imagination. ~ Pat Conroy