Top 450 Steven Pinker Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Steven Pinker

404. “Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

406. “The psychological components of war have not gone away – dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception.”

— Steven Pinker

407. “For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor – and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.”

— Steven Pinker

408. “Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.47 In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy.”

— Steven Pinker

409. “In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all.”

— Steven Pinker

410. “Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It’s just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don’t have anything sentient in them. It’s like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren’t wet.”

— Steven Pinker

411. “By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.”

— Steven Pinker

412. “Though the Nones supported Clinton over Trump by a ratio of three to one, they stayed home on November 8, 2016, while the Evangelicals lined up to vote.”

— Steven Pinker

413. “Together with the topic of a text, the reader usually needs to know its point. He needs to know what the author is trying to accomplish as she explores the topic.”

— Steven Pinker

414. “Peppier n. The waiter at a fancy restaurant whose sole purpose seems to be walking around asking diners if they want ground pepper.”

— Steven Pinker

415. “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

416. “In either case genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents or society.”

— Steven Pinker

417. “Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. Ordinarily.”

— Steven Pinker

418. “The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.”

— Steven Pinker

419. “The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.”

— Steven Pinker

420. “No system today can duplicate a person’s ability to recognize both many words and many speakers. Perhaps the state of the art is a system called DragonDictate, which runs on a personal computer and can recognize 30,000 words.”

— Steven Pinker

421. “The dicey moment when you should introduce two people but can’t remember one of their names; whomnesia, persona non data, nomenclutchure, notworking, mumbleduction, introducking.”

— Steven Pinker

422. “As far as I’m concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.”

— Steven Pinker

423. “Every audience is spread out along a bell curve of sophistication, and inevitably we’ll bore a few at the top while baffling a few at the bottom; the only question is how many there will be of each.”

— Steven Pinker

424. “Tom Hanks, who starred in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.”

— Steven Pinker

425. “Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?”

— Steven Pinker

426. “The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself.”

— Steven Pinker

427. “The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

429. “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 advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise.”

— Steven Pinker

430. “A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads – and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don’t have to become violent in self-defence.”

— Steven Pinker

431. “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the grounds of our personal lot.62.”

— Steven Pinker

432. “If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.”

— Steven Pinker

433. “Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes.”

— Steven Pinker

434. “We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking – watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.”

— Steven Pinker

435. “Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment – if people didn’t seek them, there would be no people.”

— Steven Pinker

436. “It’s really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym.”

— Steven Pinker

437. “Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators.”

— Steven Pinker

438. “As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.”

— Steven Pinker

439. “America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for – until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.”

— Steven Pinker

440. “Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement.”

— Steven Pinker

441. “But our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an infinitesimal instant. Instead it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous “now” but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.”

— Steven Pinker

442. “I don’t consider myself to be that radical a thinker.”

— Steven Pinker

443. “Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal.”

— Steven Pinker

444. “As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we’re interested in what makes one person different from another. We’ve got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.”

— Steven Pinker

445. “Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth.”

— Steven Pinker

446. “Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.”

— Steven Pinker

447. “It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate.”

— Steven Pinker

448. “I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.”

— Steven Pinker

449. “Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.”

— Steven Pinker

450. “King immediately appreciated that Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance was not a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teachings of Jesus. Instead it was a set of hardheaded tactics to prevail over an adversary by outwitting him rather than trying to annihilate him.”

— Steven Pinker