Top 500 Steven Pinker Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we’re interested in what makes one person different from another. We’ve got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.”

— Steven Pinker

452. “Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal.”

— Steven Pinker

453. “The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun.”

— Steven Pinker

454. “Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.”

— Steven Pinker

455. “We live in an era of social science, and have become accustomed to understanding the social world in terms of “forces,” “pressures,” “processes,” and “developments.” It is easy to forget that those “forces” are statistical summaries of the deeds of millions of men and women who act on their beliefs in pursuit of their desires. The.”

— Steven Pinker

456. “The Scientific Revolution had revealed that everyday experience is a narrow slice of a vast continuum of scales from the microscopic to the astronomical, and that our own abode is a rock orbiting a star rather than the center of creation.”

— Steven Pinker

457. “It’s often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well.”

— Steven Pinker

458. “There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language.”

— Steven Pinker

459. “A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed.”

— Steven Pinker

460. “The dream at the dawn of the internet age that giving everyone a platform would birth a new Enlightenment seems cringeworthy today, now that we are living with bots, trolls, flame wars, fake news, twitter shaming mobs, and online harrasment.”

— Steven Pinker

461. “Reality is a powerful selection pressure. A hominid that soothed itself by believing that a lion was a turtle or that eating sand would nourish its body would be outreproduced by its reality-based rivals.”

— Steven Pinker

462. “Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about where to aim it and when to fire.”

— Steven Pinker

463. “And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments – the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us. Because in the twenty-first century, when we think by the seat of our pants, every correction can make things worse, and can send our democracy into a graveyard spiral.”

— Steven Pinker

464. “When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality – the interchangeability of perspectives – you get the core of morality.”

— Steven Pinker

465. “Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us.27 Only when we ask those people do we discover that what’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to them. That’s why professional writers have editors.”

— Steven Pinker

466. “The classic errors in reasoning are often called “cognitive illusions,” and the parallels with the visual illusions familiar from cereal boxes and science museums are instructive. They run deeper than the obvious fact that our eyes and minds can trick us. They explain how our species can be so smart and yet so easily deluded.”

— Steven Pinker

467. “A coherent text is a designed object: an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connectors that tie one proposition to the next. Like other designed objects, it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details, and maintaining a sense of harmony and balance.”

— Steven Pinker

468. “A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.”

— Steven Pinker

469. “The cluster illusion, like other post hoc fallacies in probability, is the source of many superstitions: that bad things happen in threes, people are born under a bad sign, or an annus horribilis means the world is falling apart. When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.”

— Steven Pinker

470. “When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.”

— Steven Pinker

471. “It would be nice to see people earn brownie points for acknowledging uncertainty in their beliefs, questioning the dogmas of their political sect, and changing their minds when the facts change, rather than for being steadfast warriors for the dogmas of their clique.”

— Steven Pinker

472. “It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational – more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock, more Alfred E. Neuman than John von Neumann. And, the cynics continue, what else would you expect from descendants of hunter-gatherers whose minds were selected to avoid becoming lunch for leopards?”

— Steven Pinker

473. “The two deepest questions about the mind are “What makes intelligence possible?” and “What makes consciousness possible?”

— Steven Pinker

474. “The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.”

— Steven Pinker

475. “How, then, can we understand this thing called rationality which would appear to be our birthright yet is so frequently and flagrantly flouted?”

— Steven Pinker

476. “Rationality is uncool. To describe someone with a slang word for the cerebral, like nerd, wonk, geek, or brainiac, is to imply they are terminally challenged in hipness. For decades, Hollywood screenplays and rock song lyrics have equated joy and freedom with an escape from reason. “A man needs a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope and be free,” said Zorba the Greek. “Stop making sense,” advised Talking Heads; “Let’s go crazy,” adjured the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.”

— Steven Pinker

477. “Intuitive probability is driven by imaginability: the easier something is to visualize, the likelier it seems. This entraps us into what Tversky and Kahneman call the conjunction fallacy, in which a conjunction is more intuitively probable than either of its elements.”

— Steven Pinker

478. “Recall that intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles.”

— Steven Pinker

479. “The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.”

— Steven Pinker

480. “For every job lost to automation, a new one will materialize that we cannot anticipate: he unemployed forklift operators will retrain as tattoo removal technicians and video game costume designers and social media content moderators and pet psychiatrists.”

— Steven Pinker

481. “Calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic or civilization-clashing. The overwhelming majority of victims of Islamic violence and repression are other Muslims.”

— Steven Pinker

482. “Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.”

— Steven Pinker

483. “Conspiracy theories and viral falsehoods are probably as old as language.”

— Steven Pinker

484. “Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”

— Steven Pinker

485. “And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments – the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us.”

— Steven Pinker

486. “Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning. These include logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the optimal ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence, and the yardsticks for making rational choices alone and with others.”

— Steven Pinker

487. “Mass incarceration, even if it does lower violence, introduces problems of its own. Once the most violent individuals have been locked up, imprisoning more of them rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, because each additional prisoner become less and less dangerous, and pulling them off the streets makes a smaller and smaller dent in the violence rate.”

— Steven Pinker

488. “I believe that journalists have not given enough thought to the way that media coverage can activate our cognitive biases and distort our understanding.”

— Steven Pinker

489. “The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what’s common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead.”

— Steven Pinker

490. “People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary’s malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife.”

— Steven Pinker

491. “Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible’s approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own.”

— Steven Pinker

492. “Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing.”

— Steven Pinker

493. “Humans are ingenious at sniffing out minor differences to figure out whom they should despise.”

— Steven Pinker

494. “If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.”

— Steven Pinker

495. “It may be upsetting when someone says mean things on Twitter, but it is not the same as the slave trade or the Holocaust.”

— Steven Pinker

496. “For returning “washday” to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.”

— Steven Pinker

497. “Natural selection consists of competition among genes to be represented in the next generation, and the organisms we see today are descendants of those that edged out their rivals in contests for mates, food, and dominance.”

— Steven Pinker

498. “Also, a state without an effective police and judiciary had to make a little punishment go a long way.”

— Steven Pinker

499. “These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police. Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising. A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.”

— Steven Pinker

500. “Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it’s a good problem to have.”

— Steven Pinker