Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.”

— Steven Pinker

252. “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

253. “At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people.9 Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

255. “If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.”

— Steven Pinker

256. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

258. “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

259. “Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.”

— Steven Pinker

260. “Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point.”

— Steven Pinker

261. “Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget.”

— Steven Pinker

262. “There is a joke about a little girl who is filling in a hole in her garden when a neighbor looks over the fence. He politely asks, “Hi! What are you up to?” “My goldfish died,” replies the girl tearfully, “and I’ve just buried him.” The neighbor asks, “Isn’t that an awfully big hole for a goldfish?” The little girl tamps down the soil and replies, “That’s because he’s inside your stupid cat.”

— Steven Pinker

263. “A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts.”

— Steven Pinker

264. “I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.”

— Steven Pinker

265. “Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory.”

— Steven Pinker

266. “Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.”

— Steven Pinker

267. “Eisner, together with the historian Randolph Roth, notes that crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.33.”

— Steven Pinker

268. “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

269. “The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. There is, to be sure, a tragic view of modernity in which this is impossible: industrial society, powered by flaming carbon, contains the fuel of its own destruction. But the tragic view is incorrect. Ausubel notes that the modern world has been progressively decarbonizing.”

— Steven Pinker

270. “Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people.”

— Steven Pinker

271. “In fact, war may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome, like pestilence, hunger, and poverty.”

— Steven Pinker

272. “As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world’s ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.”

— Steven Pinker

273. “Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.”

— Steven Pinker

274. “As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.”

— Steven Pinker

275. “Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful. They simulate a conversation, as classic style recommends, and they are gifts to the memory-challenged reader.”

— Steven Pinker

276. “As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.”

— Steven Pinker

277. “By all measures men are the more violent gender.”

— Steven Pinker

278. “The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.”

— Steven Pinker

279. “And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain – human empathy is too feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers – but in the sense of realizing that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can flourish.”

— Steven Pinker

280. “Of course, genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.”

— Steven Pinker

281. “The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history’s saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.”

— Steven Pinker

282. “I don’t think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.”

— Steven Pinker

283. “Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war.”

— Steven Pinker

284. “There are but three groups worthy of respect,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, “the priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.”

— Steven Pinker

285. “Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things – not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.”

— Steven Pinker

286. “Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable – who could be against human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that does not come naturally to the human mind.”

— Steven Pinker

287. “The reason I’m not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.”

— Steven Pinker

288. “The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution.”

— Steven Pinker

289. “Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.”

— Steven Pinker

290. “An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.”

— Steven Pinker

291. “I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.”

— Steven Pinker

292. “It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.”

— Steven Pinker

293. “Working out what it would take to program goodness into a robot shows not only how much machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with.”

— Steven Pinker

294. “The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights. This.”

— Steven Pinker

295. “Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.”

— Steven Pinker

296. “If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.”

— Steven Pinker

297. “Once you start rummaging around in the realm of the unverifiable there is considerable room for creativity, and accusations of sorcery are often blended with self-serving motives. Tribal people, anthropologists have shown, often single out despised in-laws for allegations of witchcraft, a convenient.”

— Steven Pinker

298. “The beauty of reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason.”

— Steven Pinker

299. “It’s likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.”

— Steven Pinker

300. “The realization of the perfect riposte three hours after the argument: hindser, stairwit, retrotort, afterism.”

— Steven Pinker