Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors.”

— Steven Pinker

152. “As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision.”

— Steven Pinker

153. “Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.”

— Steven Pinker

154. “Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.”

— Steven Pinker

155. “Any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism.” A.”

— Steven Pinker

156. “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”

— Steven Pinker

157. “In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.”

— Steven Pinker

158. “A comparative adjective is appropriate when the two items are being directly contrasted, one against the other; a superlative can work when an item is superior not just to the alternative in view at the time but to a larger implicit comparison group.”

— Steven Pinker

159. “As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.”

— Steven Pinker

160. “The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.”

— Steven Pinker

161. “To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science – skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing – are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge.”

— Steven Pinker

162. “Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.”

— Steven Pinker

163. “There’s a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective ‘Darwinian’ used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that’s not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it’s whatever leads to reproductive success.”

— Steven Pinker

164. “Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution.”

— Steven Pinker

165. “If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatorics. Metaphor allows the mind to use a few basic ideas-substance, location, force, goal-to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones.”

— Steven Pinker

166. “We’re living in primate heaven. We’re warm, dry, we’re not hungry, we don’t have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?”

— Steven Pinker

167. “Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.”

— Steven Pinker

168. “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.”

— Steven Pinker

169. “Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.”

— Steven Pinker

170. “A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.”

— Steven Pinker

171. “Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.”

— Steven Pinker

172. “Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.”

— Steven Pinker

173. “There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.”

— Steven Pinker

174. “Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.”

— Steven Pinker

175. “Progress, The Progress Paradox, Infinite Progress, The Infinite Resource, The Rational Optimist, The Case for Rational Optimism, Utopia for Realists, Mass Flourishing, Abundance, The Improving State of the World, Getting Better, The End of Doom, The Moral Arc, The Big Ratchet, The Great Escape, The Great Surge, The Great Convergence.”

— Steven Pinker

176. “Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too.”

— Steven Pinker

177. “One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.”

— Steven Pinker

178. “Violence pervaded their entertainment as well. Tuchman describes two of the popular sports of the time: “Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws...”

— Steven Pinker

179. “Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.”

— Steven Pinker

180. “The combination of a shorter workweek, more paid time off, and a longer retirement means that the fraction of a person’s life that is taken up by work has fallen by a quarter just since 1960.”

— Steven Pinker

181. “Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point.”

— Steven Pinker

182. “Just as blueprints don’t necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don’t necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.”

— Steven Pinker

183. “Journalists assigned to an issue often cover the coverage, creating the notorious media echo chamber.”

— Steven Pinker

184. “Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.”

— Steven Pinker

185. “Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!”

— Steven Pinker

186. “So no, it’s not all in the genes, but what isn’t in the genes isn’t in the family environment either. It can’t be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.”

— Steven Pinker

187. “Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.”

— Steven Pinker

188. “We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.”

— Steven Pinker

189. “According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.”

— Steven Pinker

190. “Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they’re less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people’s lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore.”

— Steven Pinker

191. “Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: “progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.”

— Steven Pinker

192. “If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.”

— Steven Pinker

193. “When energy is poured into a system, and the system dissipates that energy in its slide toward entropy, it can become poised in an orderly, indeed beautiful, configuration – a sphere, spiral, starburst, whirlpool, ripple, crystal, or fractal. The fact that we find these configurations beautiful, incidentally, suggests that beauty may not just be in the eye of the beholder. The brain’s aesthetic response may be a receptiveness to the counter-entropic patterns that can spring forth from nature.”

— Steven Pinker

194. “Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.”

— Steven Pinker

195. “The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.”

— Steven Pinker

196. “Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.”

— Steven Pinker

197. “Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.”

— Steven Pinker

198. “One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire.”

— Steven Pinker

199. “The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

— Steven Pinker

200. “There’s guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.”

— Steven Pinker