The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
Interpretation
Life's complexities require trade-offs, such as the skills we gain in youth versus the challenges we face later.
This quote by Steven Pinker suggests that the difficulties we encounter as learners in language and other skills during adulthood reflect the remarkable adaptability and genius we exhibited as infants. It underscores the idea that each stage of life comes with its own challenges and benefits, highlighting the inevitable trade-offs that define our growth from youth to old age.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a speech on the journey of learning and growing throughout life.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
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.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.
Thoughtfulness is the way to deathlessness, thoughtlessness the way to death. The thoughtful do not die: the thoughtless are as if dead already.
But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
Brutes by their natural instinct have produced many discoveries, whereas men by discussion and the conclusions of reason have given birth to few or none.
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