Top 500 Steven Pinker Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt.”

— Steven Pinker

302. “Since that era the question “Do you have any food restrictions?” has become a part of the etiquette of a dinner invitation, and participants at conference dinners can now tick a box that will replace a plate of rubber chicken with a plate of sodden eggplant.”

— Steven Pinker

303. “Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young.”

— Steven Pinker

304. “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

305. “One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.”

— Steven Pinker

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

317. “The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child’s peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.”

— Steven Pinker

318. “In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires.”

— Steven Pinker

319. “Religions can also clash with humanism by valuing souls above lives, which is not as uplifting as it sounds. Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal, because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one’s existence;.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

321. “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.”

— Steven Pinker

322. “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

323. “You can write with clarity and with flair, too. And though the emphasis is on nonfiction, the explanations should be useful to fiction writers as well, because many principles of style apply whether the world being written about is real or imaginary. I like to think they might also be helpful to poets, orators, and other creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose to flout them for rhetorical effect.”

— Steven Pinker

324. “One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.”

— Steven Pinker

325. “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

— Steven Pinker

326. “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

327. “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

328. “Slavery and other forms of bondage, of course, have not been obliterated from the face of the earth. As a result of recent publicity about the trafficking of people for labor and prostitution, one sometimes hears the statistically illiterate and morally obtuse claim that nothing has changed since the 18th century, as if there were no difference between a clandestine practice in a few parts of the world and an authorized practice everywhere in the world.”

— Steven Pinker

329. “In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it’s a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don’t have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.”

— Steven Pinker

330. “As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.”

— Steven Pinker

331. “We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions.”

— Steven Pinker

332. “Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.”

— Steven Pinker

333. “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

334. “No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you’re still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.”

— Steven Pinker

335. “As soon as you add an intensifier, you’re turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scale.”

— Steven Pinker

336. “Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.”

— Steven Pinker

337. “I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it’s tennis without a net.”

— Steven Pinker

338. “We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.”

— Steven Pinker

339. “By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.”

— Steven Pinker

340. “The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.”

— Steven Pinker

341. “We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out” – or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.”

— Steven Pinker

342. “The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38.”

— Steven Pinker

343. “An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility – just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.”

— Steven Pinker

344. “The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.270.”

— Steven Pinker

345. “The basic script of an agonist tending, an antagonist reacting, played out in different combinations and outcomes, underlies the meaning of the causal constructions in most, perhaps all, of the world’s languages. And in language after language, the prototypical force-dynamic scenario-an antagonist directly and intentionally causing a passive agonist to change from its intrinsic state-gets pride of place in the language’s most concise causative construction.”

— Steven Pinker

346. “Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism.”

— Steven Pinker

347. “Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.”

— Steven Pinker

348. “A dirty secret of the conservation movement is that wilderness preserves are set up only after indigenous peoples have been decimated or forcibly removed from them, including the national parks in the United States and the Serengeti in East Africa.”

— Steven Pinker

349. “The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.”

— Steven Pinker

350. “As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can’t kill someone and trade with him too.”

— Steven Pinker