Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it’s a more inviting one.”

— Steven Pinker

102. “I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.”

— Steven Pinker

103. “I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.”

— Steven Pinker

104. “The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.”

— Steven Pinker

105. “Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.”

— Steven Pinker

106. “Look at almost any passage, and you’ll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It’s not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it’s just that that’s the way language works.”

— Steven Pinker

107. “I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology – that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.”

— Steven Pinker

108. “People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven’t given much thought to the connections.”

— Steven Pinker

109. “However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future.”

— Steven Pinker

110. “Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.”

— Steven Pinker

111. “Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.”

— Steven Pinker

112. “Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it.”

— Steven Pinker

113. “The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator.”

— Steven Pinker

114. “Why is it surprising that scientists might have long hair and wear cowboy boots? In fields like neuroscience, where the events you are recording are so minute, I suspect scientists cultivate a boring, reliable image. A scientist with a reputation for flamboyance might be suspect.”

— Steven Pinker

115. “The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”

— Steven Pinker

116. “Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek – why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.”

— Steven Pinker

117. “The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.”

— Steven Pinker

118. “Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.”

— Steven Pinker

119. “Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity – which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.”

— Steven Pinker

120. “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

121. “Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology – hence the ubiquitous foreign accent.”

— Steven Pinker

122. “Friendship, like other kinds of altruism, is vulnerable to cheaters, and we have a special name for them: fair-weather friends. These sham friends reap the benefits of associating with a valuable person and mimic signs of warmth in an effort to become valued themselves. But when a little rain falls, they are nowhere in sight.”

— Steven Pinker

123. “Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.”

— Steven Pinker

124. “Keep in mind a bit of wisdom from the linguist Ann Farmer: ‘It isn’t about being right. It’s about getting it right.”

— Steven Pinker

125. “My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one’s convictions can be subjected to empirical test.”

— Steven Pinker

126. “Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.10.”

— Steven Pinker

127. “Forcing modern speakers of English to not – whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn’t done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.”

— Steven Pinker

128. “But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don’t depend on information coming in from the senses.”

— Steven Pinker

129. “Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence. The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune maybe no one’s fault.”

— Steven Pinker

130. “If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away.”

— Steven Pinker

131. “Feminization is the process in which cultures have increasingly respected the interests and values of women. 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

132. “Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?”

— Steven Pinker

133. “The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.”

— Steven Pinker

134. “Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend.”

— Steven Pinker

135. “The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.”

— Steven Pinker

136. “Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.”

— Steven Pinker

137. “Behavioral genetics confirms that aggressive tendencies can be inherited, and that gives natural selection material to work with in shifting the average violent tendencies of a population.”

— Steven Pinker

138. “We can shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision.”

— Steven Pinker

139. “There’s a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it’s fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, ‘Why even try to work toward peace if we’re just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?’”

— Steven Pinker

140. “In our society, the best predictor of a man’s wealth is his wife’s looks, and the best predictor of a woman’s looks is her husband’s wealth.”

— Steven Pinker

141. “According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.”

— Steven Pinker

142. “I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.”

— Steven Pinker

143. “When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.”

— Steven Pinker

144. “Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever fought in a war.”

— Steven Pinker

145. “In any dispute, each side thinks it’s in the right and the other side is demons.”

— Steven Pinker

146. “The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases.”

— Steven Pinker

147. “As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two.”

— Steven Pinker

148. “Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.”

— Steven Pinker

149. “As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47.”

— Steven Pinker

150. “As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister.”

— Steven Pinker