Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.”

— Steven Pinker

52. “If crime is going down, you shouldn’t be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.”

— Steven Pinker

53. “Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject.”

— Steven Pinker

54. “Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.”

— Steven Pinker

55. “Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.”

— Steven Pinker

56. “Adam Smith called it the paradox of value: when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what people are willing to pay for it. The difference is called consumer surplus, and the explosion of this surplus over time is impossible to tabulate.”

— Steven Pinker

57. “Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?”

— Steven Pinker

58. “Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.”

— Steven Pinker

59. “If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called ‘pure evil’ because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.”

— Steven Pinker

60. “The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.”

— Steven Pinker

61. “The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.”

— Steven Pinker

62. “There is a joke about a commuter who’s on his way to work when he gets a call on his mobile phone from his wife. “Be careful, honey,” she says. “They just said on the radio that there’s a maniac driving on the wrong side of the freeway.” “One maniac?” he replies; “There are thousands of them!”

— Steven Pinker

63. “Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.”

— Steven Pinker

64. “When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.”

— Steven Pinker

65. “Everyone’s pedigree merges into everyone else’s pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.”

— Steven Pinker

66. “Syntax is complex, but the complexity is there for a reason. For our thoughts are surely even more complex, and we are limited by a mouth that can pronounce a single word at a time.”

— Steven Pinker

67. “When I grew up, bullying was considered a natural part of boyhood. It would have strained belief to think that someday the president of the United States would deliver a speech about its evils, as Barack Obama did in 2011. 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

68. “Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn’t.”

— Steven Pinker

69. “There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.”

— Steven Pinker

70. “Adam Freedman points out in his book on legalese, “What distinguishes legal boilerplate is its combination of archaic terminology and frenzied verbosity, as though it were written by a medieval scribe on crack.”

— Steven Pinker

71. “I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.”

— Steven Pinker

72. “The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.”

— Steven Pinker

73. “The shift is not toward complacency: we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.”

— Steven Pinker

74. “One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land.”

— Steven Pinker

75. “In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’”

— Steven Pinker

76. “People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like.”

— Steven Pinker

77. “Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested – to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.”

— Steven Pinker

78. “Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.”

— Steven Pinker

79. “Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.”

— Steven Pinker

80. “All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers.”

— Steven Pinker

81. “A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication; it can lead to better reasoning.”

— Steven Pinker

82. “When gentlemen agreed to a duel, they were fighting not for money or land or even women but for honor, the strange commodity that exists because everyone believes that everyone else believes that it exists.”

— Steven Pinker

83. “Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone’s home.”

— Steven Pinker

84. “The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.”

— Steven Pinker

85. “No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.”

— Steven Pinker

86. “Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.”

— Steven Pinker

87. “The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.”

— Steven Pinker

88. “Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?”

— Steven Pinker

89. “The brain is not a bag of traits. It’s startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.”

— Steven Pinker

90. “The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.”

— Steven Pinker

91. “People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.”

— Steven Pinker

92. “The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.”

— Steven Pinker

93. “Plants can’t very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.”

— Steven Pinker

94. “The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’ – thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.”

— Steven Pinker

95. “Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.”

— Steven Pinker

96. “An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton’s world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein’s. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.”

— Steven Pinker

97. “Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people’s interests into account, who’s dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.”

— Steven Pinker

98. “Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.”

— Steven Pinker

99. “In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.”

— Steven Pinker

100. “Galileo wrote that ’the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.”

— Steven Pinker