Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth.”

— Steven Pinker

452. “Some of the most rewarding scientific pursuits begin with the discovery of a paradox. Nature does not go out of its way to befuddle us, and if some phenomenon seems to make no sense no matter how we look at it, we are probably in ignorance of deep and far-ranging principles.”

— Steven Pinker

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.”

— Steven Pinker

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

462. “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

463. “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

464. “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor favor to those of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. An essential part of rationality is dealing with randomness in our lives and uncertainty in our knowledge.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

466. “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

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

— 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. “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. “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

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. – George Carlin.”

— Steven Pinker

481. “But probabilities are not about the world; they’re about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.”

— Steven Pinker

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “To make decisions “rationally,” by some set of rules, means to base the decisions on some grounds of truth:.”

— Steven Pinker

486. “Complex organs evolve by small steps for the same reason that a watchmaker does not use a sledgehammer and a surgeon does not use a meat cleaver.”

— Steven Pinker

487. “Tversky and Kahneman note that no one would buy probabilistic insurance, with premiums at a fraction of the cost but coverage only on certain days of the week, though they happily incur the same overall risk by insuring themselves against some hazards, like fires, but not others, like hurricanes.27 They buy insurance for peace of mind – to give themselves one less thing to worry about.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

489. “As Francis Crick liked to say, “Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.”

— Steven Pinker

490. “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

491. “Outrages cannot become public without media coverage.”

— Steven Pinker

492. “One of the most commonly cited human irrationalities is the sunk-cost fallacy, in which people continue to invest in a losing venture because of what they have invested so far rather than in anticipation of what they will gain going forward.”

— Steven Pinker

493. “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

494. “Covid quackery, climate denial, and conspiracy theories are symptoms of what some are calling “an epistemological crisis” and a “post-truth” era.”

— Steven Pinker