Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.”

— Steven Pinker

2. “Disgust is intuitive microbiology.”

— Steven Pinker

3. “In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

— Steven Pinker

4. “I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.”

— Steven Pinker

5. “If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.”

— Steven Pinker

6. “My laptop has freed me to travel.”

— Steven Pinker

7. “Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.”

— Steven Pinker

8. “Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.”

— Steven Pinker

9. “It’s natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.”

— Steven Pinker

10. “Fiction is empathy technology.”

— Steven Pinker

11. “The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.”

— Steven Pinker

12. “We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.”

— Steven Pinker

13. “Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.”

— Steven Pinker

14. “We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in.”

— Steven Pinker

15. “Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.”

— Steven Pinker

16. “With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.”

— Steven Pinker

17. “Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.”

— Steven Pinker

18. “Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.”

— Steven Pinker

19. “Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?”

— Steven Pinker

20. “Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can’t understand many things unless you know something about astrology – the plays of Shakespeare and so on.”

— Steven Pinker

21. “If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be – you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman – if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now. – Barack Obama, 2016 CHAPTER 4 PROGRESSOPHOBIA.”

— Steven Pinker

22. “Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.”

— Steven Pinker

23. “Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.”

— Steven Pinker

24. “Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we’re exposed to an infectious world.”

— Steven Pinker

25. “Personality and socialization aren’t the same thing.”

— Steven Pinker

26. “Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless.”

— Steven Pinker

27. “As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.”

— Steven Pinker

28. “The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.”

— Steven Pinker

29. “Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.”

— Steven Pinker

30. “Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.”

— Steven Pinker

31. “I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I’m an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.”

— Steven Pinker

32. “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”

— Steven Pinker

33. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. – Carl Sagan.”

— Steven Pinker

34. “Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.”

— Steven Pinker

35. “Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don’t need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.”

— Steven Pinker

36. “The conscious mind – the self or soul – is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.”

— Steven Pinker

37. “The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.”

— Steven Pinker

38. “Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

— Steven Pinker

39. “No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn.”

— Steven Pinker

40. “The standard explanation of the madness of crowds is ignorance: a mediocre education system has left the populace scientifically illiterate, at the mercy of their cognitive biases, and thus defenseless against airhead celebrities, cable-news gladiators, and other corruptions from popular culture.”

— Steven Pinker

41. “Chris Rock observed, “This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.”

— Steven Pinker

42. “The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.”

— Steven Pinker

43. “All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.”

— Steven Pinker

44. “Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.”

— Steven Pinker

45. “Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.”

— Steven Pinker

46. “But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.”

— Steven Pinker

47. “People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.”

— Steven Pinker

48. “In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics – unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!”

— Steven Pinker

49. “Laplace’s Demon, the hypothetical imp that knows the instantaneous positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, was said to be able to calculate the entire future or past by plugging these values into the equations that express the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism.”

— Steven Pinker

50. “Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth. Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.”

— Steven Pinker