Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.”

— Steven Pinker

356. “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

357. “The imprecision in the way languages express time is related to the imprecision in the way we experience and remember it. Though no one experiences time as coarsely as the handful of distinctions in a tense system would suggest, we don’t live by a mental stopwatch either.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

359. “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations.”

— Steven Pinker

360. “We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.”

— Steven Pinker

361. “People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors’ conscience.”

— Steven Pinker

362. “As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.”

— Steven Pinker

363. “You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.”

— Steven Pinker

364. “Political ideologies, too, cannot be defined in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor that SOCIETY IS A FAMILY. The political right likens society to a family commanded by a strict father, the political left to a family cared for by a nurturant parent.”

— Steven Pinker

365. “In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.”

— Steven Pinker

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.”

— Steven Pinker

370. “James Payne notes a perverse sign of progress. Today’s Holocaust deniers at least feel compelled to deny that the Holocaust took place. In earlier centuries the perpetrators of genocide and their sympathizers boasted about it.”

— Steven Pinker

371. “Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.”

— Steven Pinker

372. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.”

— Steven Pinker

373. “Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have gantlets of improbabilities.”

— Steven Pinker

374. “The real principle is that between is used for a relationship of an individual to any number of other individuals, as long as they are being considered two at a time, whereas among is used for a relationship of an individual to an amorphous mass or collectivity.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

376. “The American punctuation rule sticks in the craw of every computer scientist, logician, and linguist, because any ordering of typographical delimiters that fails to reflect the logical nesting of the content makes a shambles of their work.”

— Steven Pinker

377. “Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”

— Steven Pinker

378. “When a genocide is carried out, only a fraction of the population, usually a police force, military unit, or militia, actually commits the murders.127 In the 1st century CE, Tacitus wrote, “A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of a few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.”

— Steven Pinker

379. “When we know something well, we don’t realize how abstractly we think about it. And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification.”

— Steven Pinker

380. “Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.”

— Steven Pinker

381. “I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.”

— Steven Pinker

382. “I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.”

— Steven Pinker

383. “For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren’t as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn’t care. We used euphemisms like ‘sackings’ and ‘sieges’ instead of calling them ‘genocides.’”

— Steven Pinker

384. “Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth.”

— Steven Pinker

385. “The results suggest that many of the things that make people happy also make their lives meaningful, such as being connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored.”

— Steven Pinker

386. “Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.”

— Steven Pinker

387. “Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner’s passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?”

— Steven Pinker

388. “Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That’s why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy.”

— Steven Pinker

389. “I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated.”

— Steven Pinker

390. “In his book The Expanding Circle, the philosopher Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own.”

— Steven Pinker

391. “Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer from siderodromophobia. Having misgivings about your mother-in-law is pentheraphobia, and being petrified of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth is arachibutyrophobia. And then there’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s affliction, the fear of fear itself, or phobophobia.”

— Steven Pinker

392. “The Perpetrator’s Narrative: The story begins with the harmful act. At the time I had good reasons for doing it. Perhaps I was responding to an immediate provocation. Or I was just reacting to the situation in a way that any reasonable person would. I had a perfect right to do what I did, and it’s unfair to blame me for it. The harm was minor, and easily repaired, and I apologized. It’s time to get over it, put it behind us, let bygones be bygones. The.”

— Steven Pinker

393. “Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself.”

— Steven Pinker

394. “Napoleon, that exponent of martial glory, sniffed at England as “a nation of shopkeepers.” But at the time Britons earned 83 percent more than Frenchmen and enjoyed a third more calories, and we all know what happened at Waterloo.15.”

— Steven Pinker

395. “Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today’s Republican party, just as the two Georges – the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern – found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972.”

— Steven Pinker

396. “The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.1 No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.”

— Steven Pinker

397. “What is true for the emotions may also be true for the intellect. Some of our perplexities may come from a mismatch between the purposes for which our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today.”

— Steven Pinker

398. “But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.”

— Steven Pinker

399. “The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood.”

— Steven Pinker

400. “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