Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “Man has no nature; what he has is history.”

— Steven Pinker

254. “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

255. “Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

261. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn’t happen to them.”

— Steven Pinker

274. “Young pregnant women who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term.”

— Steven Pinker

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.”

— Steven Pinker

281. “It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.”

— Steven Pinker

282. “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

283. “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

284. “John Dryden wrote that a work of fiction is “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.”

— Steven Pinker

285. “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

286. “People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.”

— Steven Pinker

287. “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

288. “Existen buenas razones evolutivas para que los miembros de una especie inteligente intenten vivir en paz.”

— Steven Pinker

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “Trend-setters are members of upper classes who adopt the styles of lower classes to differentiate themselves from middle classes, who wouldn’t be caught dead in lower-class styles because they’re the ones in danger of being mistaken for them.”

— Steven Pinker

293. “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

294. “The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820, and almost two hundredfold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.”

— Steven Pinker

295. “The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know.”

— Steven Pinker

296. “Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt.”

— Steven Pinker

297. “Abstract ideas are connected in a systematic way to more concrete experiences.”

— Steven Pinker

298. “Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.”

— Steven Pinker

299. “An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker