Top 500 Steven Pinker Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

374. “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

375. “Nationalism should not be confused with civic values, public spirit, social responsibility, or cultural pride.”

— Steven Pinker

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

391. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

393. “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

394. “Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by.”

— Steven Pinker

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The.”

— Steven Pinker

400. “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