Steven Pinker Quotes

Quotes about:

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

Steven Pinker

Believe, Psychology, Magic

"Steven Pinker: The evolutionary man". Interview with John Crace, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2008.

66 Copy quote
I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Steven Pinker

Giving, Purpose, Realization

40 Copy quote
Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

Steven Pinker

Thanks, Language, Redundancy

Steven Pinker (1994). “The Language Instinct”, William Morrow & Company

54 Copy quote
Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.

Steven Pinker

Children, Intelligent, People

"This much I know". Interview With Tom Templeton, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2008.

9 Copy quote
Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless

Steven Pinker

Goal, Concepts, Meaningless

12 Copy quote
In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.

Steven Pinker

Country, Book, Character

"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". Book by Steven Pinker, October 4, 2011.

26 Copy quote
Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.

Steven Pinker

Gun, Government, Culture

7 Copy quote
Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

Steven Pinker

Baby, Reading, Different

38 Copy quote
Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.

Steven Pinker

Sex, Fear, Animal

20 Copy 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

Children, Ideas, Achievement

"Steven Pinker: The evolutionary man". Interview with John Crace, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2008.

0 Copy quote
What a dull universe it would be if everything in it conformed to our expectations, if it held nothing to surprise or baffle us or confound our common sense. A century ago no one foresaw the existence of black holes, an expanding universe, oceans on Jupiter's moons, or DNA. What could be more enriching than to know that we share a common origin with all living things, that we are kin to chimpanzees, redwoods and mollusks? And isn't it a source of wonder to realize that the iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones were created in the bellies of supernovas?

Steven Pinker

Ocean, Moon, Dna

17 Copy quote
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?

Steven Pinker

Heaven, Fleas, Dry

"Steven Pinker: the mind reader". www.theguardian.com. November 5, 1999.

27 Copy quote
We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.

Steven Pinker

Perfect, World, A Perfect World

33 Copy quote
Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.

Steven Pinker

Atheist, Knowing, Views

29 Copy quote
Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.

Steven Pinker

People, Goal, Making Love

Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.143, W. W. Norton & Company

1 Copy quote
Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

Steven Pinker

Memories, Psychology, Mind

"Steven Pinker: fighting talk from the prophet of peace". Interview with John Naughton, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2011.

7 Copy quote
Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe.

Steven Pinker

Commitment, Wish, Realization

13 Copy quote
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

Steven Pinker

Children, War, Thinking

Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.14, Penguin

11 Copy quote
Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.

Steven Pinker

Kids, Race, Culture

1 Copy quote
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.

Steven Pinker

Faith, Believe, People

"Brilliant Father Teaches His Children to Argue With Him Using Ancient Greek Rhetoric". rebrn.com. May 29, 2009.

26 Copy quote
The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason

Steven Pinker

Uplifting, People, Soul

Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.170, Penguin

30 Copy quote
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

Steven Pinker

Sensitive, Cheesecake, Spots

Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.534, W. W. Norton & Company

66 Copy quote
Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

Steven Pinker

Trying, Looks, Way

1 Copy quote
In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods.

Steven Pinker

Believe, People, Soul

Steven Pinker (2003). “How the Mind Works”, p.494, Penguin UK

15 Copy quote
After their return from Babylon, the practice of human sacrifice died out among the Jews, but survived as an ideal in one of its break-away sects, which believed that God accepted the torture-sacrifice of an innocent man in exchange for not visiting a worse fate on the rest of humanity. The sect is called Christianity.

Steven Pinker

Fate, Sacrifice, Men

Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes”, p.205, Penguin UK

13 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Rebecca Goldstein

Richard Dawkins

Malcolm Gladwell

Steven Pinker

Follow

Born: September 18, 1954
Occupation: Psychologist
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics