Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.”

— Steven Pinker

202. “People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.”

— Steven Pinker

203. “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

204. “The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.”

— Steven Pinker

205. “People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.”

— Steven Pinker

206. “All of the violence that doesn’t occur doesn’t get reported on the news.”

— Steven Pinker

207. “Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause.”

— Steven Pinker

208. “We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.”

— Steven Pinker

209. “The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs.”

— Steven Pinker

210. “Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

212. “The view that humans are passive receptacles of stereotypes, words, and images is condescending to ordinary people and gives unearned importance to the pretensions of cultural and academic elites.”

— Steven Pinker

213. “For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.”

— Steven Pinker

214. “The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior – marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on – certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.”

— Steven Pinker

215. “Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”30.”

— Steven Pinker

216. “Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.”

— Steven Pinker

217. “The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound.”

— Steven Pinker

218. “There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts – decoration of surfaces and bodies – appears to be a human universal.”

— Steven Pinker

219. “Education is an admirable thing,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

— Steven Pinker

220. “Leaders began to profess their love of peace and to claim that war had been forced upon them.118 As Mueller notes, “No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Gradually this was changed to ‘I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.’ This might be seen as progress.”119.”

— Steven Pinker

221. “So what’s in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.”

— Steven Pinker

222. “Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.”

— Steven Pinker

223. “Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe.”

— Steven Pinker

224. “Everything in human affairs is connected to everything else, and that is especially true of violence. Across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in trade.”

— Steven Pinker

225. “Journalists sometimes speculate about “brain transplants” when they really should be calling them “body transplants,” because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient.”

— Steven Pinker

226. “I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.”

— Steven Pinker

227. “The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.”

— Steven Pinker

228. “A similar semianarchy burst out in parts of Central Asia and the Balkans in the 1990s, when the communist federations that had ruled them for decades suddenly unraveled. One Bosnian Croat explained why ethnic violence erupted only after the breakup of Yugoslavia: “We lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much.”33.”

— Steven Pinker

229. “We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket. But these are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights.”

— Steven Pinker

230. “Literate people should know how to think about grammar.”

— Steven Pinker

231. “There’s a pattern here. In summing up the language of matter, space, and time, I concluded that they are measured by human goals, not just by a scale, a clock, and a tape measure. Now we see that the fourth major category in conceptual semantics, causality, also cares about our intentions and interests.”

— Steven Pinker

232. “And contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.”

— Steven Pinker

233. “Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.”

— Steven Pinker

234. “So if the language is our guide, the lofty declaration of abstract principles is really a story with a strange and clunky plot. Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers’ view of what forced them to do the cutting.”

— Steven Pinker

235. “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

236. “Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.”

— Steven Pinker

237. “Positive-sum games also change the incentives for violence. If you’re trading favors or surpluses with someone, your trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to you alive than dead.”

— Steven Pinker

238. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.”

— Steven Pinker

239. “I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.”

— Steven Pinker

240. “Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.”

— Steven Pinker

241. “If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time.”

— Steven Pinker

242. “Five Amazing Pieces of Good News Nobody Is Reporting,” “Five Reasons Why 2013 Was the Best Year in Human History,” “Seven Reasons the World Looks Worse Than It Really Is,” “26 Charts and Maps That Show the World Is Getting Much, Much Better,” “40 Ways the World Is Getting Better,” and my favorite, “50 Reasons We’re Living Through the Greatest Period in World History.” Let’s look at some of those reasons. CHAPTER 5 LIFE.”

— Steven Pinker

243. “A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace.”

— Steven Pinker

244. “If you aren’t just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.”

— Steven Pinker

245. “Syntax overrides carbon dioxide.”

— Steven Pinker

246. “Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain’t what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

248. “Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that’s going to expand.”

— Steven Pinker

249. “The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.”

— Steven Pinker

250. “The Moralization Gap is part of a larger phenomenon called self-serving biases. People try to look good. “Good” can mean effective, potent, desirable, and competent, or it can mean virtuous, honest, generous, and altruistic.”

— Steven Pinker