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Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2025 Update)
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Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “The realization of the perfect riposte three hours after the argument: hindser, stairwit, retrotort, afterism.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “Abstract ideas are connected in a systematic way to more concrete experiences.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Nature is a hanging judge,” goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “As soon as you add an intensifier, you’re turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scale.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “If there’s a bag in your car, and a gallon of milk in the bag, there is a gallon of milk in your car. But if there’s a person in your car, and a gallon of blood in a person, it would be strange to conclude that there is a gallon of blood in your car.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity – of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?”
Steven Pinker Quote: “When asked what consciousness is, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong’s when a reporter asked him what jazz is: “Lady, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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 Quote: “If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully.”
Steven Pinker Quote: “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.”
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