100+ Steven Pinker Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: - "Steven Pinker: 'Artists used to gush about the beauty of war. The First World War put an end to that'". Interview with Clint Witchalls, www.independent.co.uk. 10 November, 2011.

Topics: Revenge, War, Water

Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.

Topics: Color, Racism, Favors

Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.

Topics: Waste, Climate, Scarcity, Armed Conflict

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

Topics: Gmos, Perception, Brain

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.

Topics: Discovery, Political, Intellectual, Milieu

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.

Topics: Children, Long, Language Development, Mathematical Models, Connecting The Dots

'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.

Topics: War, Dirty, Numbers, Dirty Words, Free Trade

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.

Topics: Eye, Fertility, Faces

Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.

Topics: Play, Astrology, Important, Ancient World

An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

Topics: Moon, Ciphers, Sun, Solar System

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

Topics: Struggle, Thinking, Years

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.

Topics: Mean, Emotional, Thinking, Connotation

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.

Topics: Giving, Psychology, Topics, Moral Goodness

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

Topics: Children, Mean, Kids, Language Skills, Talkative

People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.

Topics: Acceptance, Long, People, Challenging Status Quo, Political Change

Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.

Topics: Two, Might, Messages, Presuming

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.

Topics: Government, Self, People, Court System, Hotheads

A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?

Topics: Prayer, Believe, Thinking, Linguistics, Snickers

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.

Topics: People, Different, Daily Life

Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.

Topics: Perspective, Suffering, World, World Is Round

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.

Topics: Cowboy, Gun, Europe, Sheriffs, Miles Away

Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer a favor, who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse. And being the first to get a piece of gossip is like engaging in insider trading: You can capitalize on an opportunity before anyone else can.

Topics: Jealous, Opportunity, Gossip, Insider Trading

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.

Topics: Psychology, Mind, Fabric

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.

Topics: Philosophy, Thinking, Ideas, Humanism

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

Topics: Art, Believe, Thinking, Arts And Humanities

I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.

Topics: Bridges, Cities, Trying, Warehouse

If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.

Topics: Track, Records, Prevention

If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.

Topics: Views, People, Life Is Like

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.

Topics: People, Important, Looks

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'

Topics: Class, Ideas, Political

It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.

Topics: Fighting, Men, Numbers, Modern Warfare

It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.

Topics: Song, People, Brain

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.

Topics: Agility, Shrewdness, Swiftness

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

Topics: Thoughtful, Style, Oral Tradition

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Topics: Memories, Years, Verbs, Irregular Verbs, Computation

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.

Topics: People, Tennis, Fans

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.

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

Topics: Memories, Psychology, Mind, Cognitive

Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism.

Topics: Self, Hatred, Noble, Noble Profession, Diaspora

Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

Topics: Mean, People, Guy, Reciprocal, Needs And Wants

Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.

Topics: Baby, Home, Animal

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.

Topics: Agreement, Community, Choices

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.

Topics: Christian, Party, Two, Strange Bedfellows, Common Enemy

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.

Topics: Children, Struggle, Compassion

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.'

Topics: People, Calling, Care, Sacking, Euphemism

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.

Topics: Class, Want, Might, Profit Motive

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

Topics: Ocean, Moon, Tree, Oak Tree, Human Evolution

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.

Topics: Numbers, Looks, Significant, Significant Numbers

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.

Topics: Trying, Looks, Way, Paragraph

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

Topics: Mind, Today, Genetics, Phobia

Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.

Topics: Book, Thinking, Trends

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

Topics: Numbers, People, World, Statistician

Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

Topics: Violent, States

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Topics: Track, People, Doe, Usage

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

Topics: Paris, Turns

One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.

Topics: Tools, Psychologist, Know Thyself

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

Topics: Atrocities, Matter, Stills, Shocked, Homo Sapiens

Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.

Topics: Mother, White, Earth

M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.

Topics: May, Brilliant, Reputation, Dilbert

Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.

Topics: Promise, Benefits, Dawn, Genomics

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

Topics: Giving, Purpose, Realization

Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless

Topics: Goal, Concepts, Meaningless

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.203, Penguin

Topics: Reading, Technology, Perspective, Vantage Point, Observing The World

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.

Topics: Baby, Reading, Different

In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth.

source: - Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.482, W. W. Norton & Company

Topics: Husband, Men, Wife

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?

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

Topics: Heaven, Fleas, Dry

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.

Topics: Commitment, Wish, Realization

We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.

Topics: Sound, Visuals, Creatures

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.

Topics: Party, Thug, Support, Third Parties, Mayhem

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?

Topics: Ocean, Moon, Dna, Supernova, Mollusks

All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.

source: - "War And Violence On The Decline In Modern Times". Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. October 8, 2012.

Topics: News, Violence

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.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.295, Penguin

Topics: Purpose, May, Today, Perplexity, Mismatch

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.

Topics: Sex, Fear, Animal

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.

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

Topics: Children, Ideas, Achievement, Peer Group

The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.717, Penguin

Topics: Religious, Allies, Doe

But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.

source: - "Q&A: Steven Pinker of 'Blank Slate'". Interview with Steve Sailer, www.upi.com. October 30, 2002.

Topics: Meaningful, Struggle, Believe, Social Engineering, Marxism

Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

Topics: Toxins, Warfare, Want, Irritants, Chemical Warfare

Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.

Topics: Believe, Men, Choices, Sexual Assault

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

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

Topics: Atheism, Serious, Jew

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.

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

Topics: Country, Book, Character, Eritrea

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.

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

Topics: Fate, Sacrifice, Men, Innocent Man, Sects

Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.449, Penguin

Topics: Average, Principles, Groups, Moral Principles

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.

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

Topics: Children, Intelligent, People

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

Topics: Cat, Awards, Rocks, Specifications, Toadstools

Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?

Topics: Growing Up, Yellow, White

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.

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

Topics: Children, War, Thinking

Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.28, Penguin

Topics: Character, Biblical, Editing, Duplication, Haphazard

If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.

Topics: Believe, Evil, Moral, Pure Evil

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

source: - Steven Pinker (2014). “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century”, p.17, Penguin

Topics: Engineering, Technique, Example, Savoring, Reverse Engineering

The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.717, Penguin

Topics: People, Sacred, Compromise

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

Topics: Psychology, Criticism, Trying, Evolutionary Psychology

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.

Topics: Media, People, Events, Rampage

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Topics: Self, Brain, Events, Maelstrom, Rationalize

Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.

Topics: Ideas, People, Ordinary

One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.

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

Topics: Loneliness, People, Feelings

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.

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

Topics: People, Goal, Making Love

Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. Pornography for men is visual, anatomical, impulsive, floridly promiscuous and devoid of context and character. Erotica for women is far more likely to be verbal, psychological, reflective, serially monogamous and rich in context and character. Men fantasise about copulating with bodies; women fantasise about making love to people.

Topics: Sex, Character, Men

If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.

Topics: Ideas, Giving, People

All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.717, Penguin

Topics: Sacrifice, People, Religion

Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.560, Penguin

Topics: Self Esteem, School, Kids, Prominent, Task Forces

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

Topics: Motivation, Inspiration, Moral

I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.

source: - Steven Pinker (2007). “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature”, p.282, Penguin

Topics: Thinking, Law, Keys, Power Of Language, Sensory

In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!

Topics: School, College, Intuition, Evolutionary Biology, Medieval Times

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.

Topics: Kids, Race, Culture, Innate

Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around them."

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.283, Penguin

Topics: People, Doe, Sake, Labeling

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.

Topics: Smart, Makeup, Judging, Perplexity

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.211, Penguin

Topics: Book, Opportunity, Games, Vengeful

The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.

source: - Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.460, W. W. Norton & Company

Topics: Mother, Sleep, Boys, Want To Sleep

According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.73, Penguin

Topics: Gray Matter, Differences, Brain, Fraternal

In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.

Topics: Thinking, Sides, Demon

The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.

source: - "Is Human Violence On The Wane?". "Science Friday" with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. October 7, 2011.

Topics: War, Europe, Tolls, Inquisition, War Of The Worlds

Dominance in an adaptation to anarchy and it serves no purpose in a society that has undergone a civilising process or in an international system regulated by agreements and norms. Anything that deflates the concept of dominance is likely to drive down the frequency of fights between individuals and wars.

Topics: War, Fighting, Agreement

Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.

source: - "War And Violence On The Decline In Modern Times". "Talk Of The Nation" with Neal ConanN, www.npr.org. December 7, 2011.

Topics: Party, Technique, Use, Leviathan

Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.

Topics: Wish, Would Be, Needs

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

source: - Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.138, W. W. Norton & Company

Topics: Years, Problem, Hundred

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.

Topics: Bullying, Children, Gay

Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?

Topics: Believe, Ideas, People, Natural Selection, Genome

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

source: - Alan Page Fiske, Tage Shakti Rai, Steven Pinker (2014). “Virtuous Violence”, p.16, Cambridge University Press

Topics: Mind, Religion, Atrocities, Acts Of Violence

If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.18, Penguin

Topics: Commitment, Makeup, Vulnerable

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.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”, p.409, Penguin UK

Topics: Cat, Judging, Language, Human Language

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.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.737, Penguin

Topics: Civilization, Accomplishment, Enlightenment, Impetus

By all measures men are the more violent gender.

Topics: Men, Gender, Violent

The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.594, Penguin UK

Topics: Children, Teaching, Taken, Human Relations, Lumps

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.203, Penguin

Topics: Compassion, Capacity, Reflexes, Human Capacity

Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people.

Topics: Lying, Believe, Thinking

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.

source: - Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.517, W. W. Norton & Company

Topics: Numbers, Psychology, Tasks, Evolutionary Psychology

The world has far too much morality.

source: - Alan Page Fiske, Tage Shakti Rai, Steven Pinker (2014). “Virtuous Violence”, p.15, Cambridge University Press

Topics: World, Too Much, Morality

You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is alive at 9 A.M. and is alive at 5 P.M., she was also alive at noon. Zebras in the wild never wear underwear. Opening a jar of a new brand of peanut butter will not vaporize the house. People never shove meat thermometers in their ears. A gerbil is smaller than Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Topics: Dog, Zebras, People, Kilimanjaro, Sheila

My laptop has freed me to travel.

Topics: Laptops, Programming

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

Topics: Hands, Hot, Use

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.

Topics: World, Fields, Topics, Subculture, Pedagogy

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

source: - Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.211, Penguin

Topics: Running, Passion, Mean, Sounder

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.

Topics: Gun, Government, Culture, International Cooperation, Economic Equality

As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.

source: - Steven Pinker (2015). “Words and Rules: The Ingredients Of Language”, p.84, Basic Books

Topics: Believe, Rats, Sophomore

The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe. the forces that make it tick, the stuff it's made of; the origin of living things, and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of; like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

Topics: Art, Ignorance, Achievement, Competitiveness, Philistines

If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.

source: - "The Man Who Invented PowerPoint". Interview with Clay Chandler, bento.hult.edu.

Topics: Thinking, Way, Used, Powerpoint

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

Topics: Thinking, Brain, Evolution

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

Topics: Mean, Simple, Long, Vagueness, Role Playing

Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.370, Penguin

Topics: Class, Criticism, Entertainment, Upper Class, Plentiful

Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

Topics: Technology, Humanity, Violence, Cultural Change

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

source: - Steven Pinker (2007). “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature”, p.18, Penguin

Topics: Reality, Understanding, World, Semantics

Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.

Topics: Theory Of Evolution, Atheism, Would Be, Vacuous

Effective education may also require co-opting old faculties to deal with new demands. . . Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun.

Topics: Fun, Demand, May

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

source: - "What Comes Naturally" by Louis Menand, www.newyorker.com. November 25, 2002.

Topics: Violence, Problem, Human Nature, Blank Slates

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Topics: Thinking, People, Chinese

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.

Topics: Thinking, Rational, Unconscious, Tacit

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite.

Topics: Art, Character, People, Edification, Elitism

Fiction is empathy technology.

Topics: Technology, Empathy, Fiction

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.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.232, Penguin

Topics: Technology, Simple, People

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

Topics: Intellectual, Guilt, Western Culture, Intellectual Life

Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness ot to answer any question we are capable of asking.

source: - "How the Mind Works". Book by Steven Pinker, 1997.

Topics: Philosophical, Angel, Mind, Homo Sapiens

The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.

Topics: Fear, Years, Brain, Low Level, Higher Calling

We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in.

Topics: Real, Snakes, Car, Fast Car

If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time.

Topics: Self, People, Political, Political Reform

The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.

source: - Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.66, Penguin

Topics: Culture, May, Superstitions

For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.

Topics: Children, Growing Up, Kids, Language Skills, Lenient

Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied.

source: - Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.355, W. W. Norton & Company

Topics: Agency, Space, Research, Cognitive

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

Topics: Long, Groups, World

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.

source: - "Steven Pinker: the optimistic voice of science" by Andrew Anthony, www.theguardian.com. September 17, 2011.

Topics: Dream, Pursuit Of Happiness, Desire, Life Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness, Totalitarianism

The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal.

source: - "On Einstein's brain". The New York Times, June 24, 1999.

Topics: Psychological Disorders, Brain, Genius, Cognitive, Structure And Function

Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.

source: - Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.133, W. W. Norton & Company

Topics: Queens, Believe, Impossible Things, Through The Looking Glass

We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.

source: - Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.549, W. W. Norton & Company

Topics: Clever, Pages, Way

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.

source: - "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature". Book by Steven Pinker, 2002.

Topics: Children, Reading, School, Written Language

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

Topics: Psychology, Evolution, Indispensable

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

Topics: Brain, Sometimes, Truth Is, Adaptive

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

source: - "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

Topics: Personality, Socialization

As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.

Topics: Men, Numbers, Violence

People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.

Topics: People, Suffering, Religion, Forgettable

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.

Topics: Evolution, Behavior, Genes, Bad Behavior

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

source: - "Surprising Family Trees!". abcnews.go.com. October 18, 2007.

Topics: Enough, Pedigree, Related

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.

Topics: Philosophy, Believe, Exercise, Human Cruelty

the mind is a neural computer

Topics: Mind, Computer

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.

Topics: People, Political, Connections

Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

source: - Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

Topics: Engineering, Challenges, Problem

Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.

Topics: Military, Gun, Southern, Economic Policy, Laissez Faire

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

Topics: Emotional, Political, Mind, Emotional Baggage

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

source: - "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

Topics: Art, Human Nature, Scholar, Folk Art

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

source: - "Basic instincts". Interview with Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. September 22, 2007.

Topics: Hate, Believe, Verbs, Irregular Verbs, Hate Mail

Steven Pinker Quotes:

famous quotes

Related Authors

Alain de Botton

Alan Lightman

Antonio Damasio

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Bert Holldobler

Bjorn Lomborg

Bruno Frey

Bryan Appleyard

Carl Zimmer

Charles C. Mann

Chris Mooney

Dacher Keltner

Dan Ariely

Daniel Dennett

Daniel Everett

Daniel Gilbert

Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Levitin

Daron Acemoglu

David Buss

David Crystal

David Deutsch

David Eagleman

David M. Raup

David Rumelhart

Donald Johanson

Douglas Hofstadter

E. O. Wilson

Edward S. Herman

Edward Sapir

Elaine Scarry

Elizabeth Spelke

Erez Lieberman Aiden

Eric Mazur

Eric Partridge

Frans de Waal

Gad Saad

Gary Marcus

Geoffrey Miller

George C. Williams

George Lakoff

Greg Mankiw

Gregory Berns

Guy Cook

Guy Deutscher

Hans Asperger

Helen Fisher

Herbert W. Armstrong

Hersh Shefrin

Howard Moskowitz

Howie Klein

Jaak Panksepp

James Rachels

Jared Diamond

Jean Aitchison

Jerry A. Coyne

Jerry Fodor

Jesse Bering

Joe Bageant

John H. McWhorter

John Maynard Smith

John Sununu

John Tooby

Jonah Lehrer

Jonathan Gottschall

Jonathan Haidt

Joseph Carroll

Joseph H. Flom

Joshua Foer

Judith Hooper

Julian Baggini

K. Anders Ericsson

Lawrence M. Krauss

Lawrence Wright

Leah Price

Leon Wieseltier

Louann Brizendine