Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

305. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

307. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

309. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

311. “If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.”

— Steven Pinker

312. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

314. “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. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.”

— Steven Pinker

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.”

— Steven Pinker

329. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

331. “Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10.”

— Steven Pinker

332. “I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.”

— Steven Pinker

333. “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

334. “Nor is mathematics about a Platonic reality of eternal truths. It is a creation of the human body and senses, growing out of the activities of moving along a path and of collecting, constructing, and measuring objects.”

— Steven Pinker

335. “The flexibility of the human mind – its ability to flip frames, shift gestalts, or reconstruct events – is a wondrous talent. But it makes it difficult to predict how person will think and talk about a given situation. When I hit a wall with the stick, am I affecting the stick by moving it to the wall, or affecting the wall using the stick as an instrument?”

— Steven Pinker

336. “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

337. “Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.”

— Steven Pinker

338. “Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as “reductionist” or “determinist.” The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad.”

— Steven Pinker

339. “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

340. “We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.”

— Steven Pinker

341. “The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.”

— Steven Pinker

342. “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

343. “In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die.”

— Steven Pinker

344. “Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold business people in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.”

— Steven Pinker

345. “However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

347. “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

348. “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

349. “Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary contains the following entry: Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.”

— Steven Pinker

350. “Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.”

— Steven Pinker