Top 35 Alison Gopnik Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.”

— Alison Gopnik

2. “Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It’s actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.”

— Alison Gopnik

3. “Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.”

— Alison Gopnik

4. “It’s not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children.”

— Alison Gopnik

5. “On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.”

— Alison Gopnik

6. “Owning our past allows us to own our future.”

— Alison Gopnik

7. “The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, ‘Gee, you are really special’ to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.”

— Alison Gopnik

8. “The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There’s a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.”

— Alison Gopnik

9. “Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.”

— Alison Gopnik

10. “What’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double espressos.”

— Alison Gopnik

11. “Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific – this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.”

— Alison Gopnik

12. “What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.”

— Alison Gopnik

13. “The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn’t have the same exponential, transformative effect.”

— Alison Gopnik

14. “We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness – better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.”

— Alison Gopnik

15. “Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.”

— Alison Gopnik

16. “Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn’t necessarily richer or poorer.”

— Alison Gopnik

17. “If parents are the fixed stars in the childs universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.”

— Alison Gopnik

18. “The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It’s not a blank slate, but it isn’t written in stone, either.”

— Alison Gopnik

19. “Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: How should this society work? How should relationships among people work? The exploration is: Who am I, what am I doing?”

— Alison Gopnik

20. “Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.”

— Alison Gopnik

21. “One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.”

— Alison Gopnik

22. “Our brains are designed to arrive at an accurate picture of the world, and to use that accurate picture to act on the world effectively, at least overall and in the long run. The same computational and neurological capacities that let us make discoveries about physics or biology also let us make discoveries about love.”

— Alison Gopnik

23. “Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them. The.”

— Alison Gopnik

24. “What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.”

— Alison Gopnik

25. “I’m afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.”

— Alison Gopnik

26. “The very best outcome is that our children will end up as decent, independent adults who will regard us with bemused and tolerant affection; for them to continue to treat us with the passionate attachment of infancy would be pathological. Almost every hard decision of child-rearing, each tiny step – Should I let her cross the street? Can he walk to school yet? Should I look in her dresser drawer? – is about how to give up control, not how to increase it; how to cede power, not how to gain it.”

— Alison Gopnik

27. “Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.”

— Alison Gopnik

28. “Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that’s how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.”

— Alison Gopnik

29. “The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.”

— Alison Gopnik

30. “The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.”

— Alison Gopnik

31. “Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.”

— Alison Gopnik

32. “In fact, our brains are most active, and hungriest, in the first few years of life. Even as adults, our brains use a lot of energy: when you just sit still, about 20 percent of your calories go to your brain. One-year-olds use much more than that, and by four, fully 66 percent of calories go to the brain, more than at any other period of development. In fact, the physical growth of children slows down in early childhood to compensate for the explosive activity of their brains.”

— Alison Gopnik

33. “It’s turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.”

— Alison Gopnik

34. “Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn’t lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.”

— Alison Gopnik

35. “From an evolutionary perspective, parenting isn’t a good model for parents and children. Caring for children, nurturing them and investing in them, is absolutely critical for human thriving. Teaching children implicitly and explicitly is certainly important. But, from the point of view of evolution, trying to consciously shape how your children will turn out is both futile and self-defeating.”

— Alison Gopnik

36. “I’ll show that babies, like scientists, use statistics and experiments to learn about the world.”

— Alison Gopnik