Steven Pinker Quotes

The world has far too much morality.

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.

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

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

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

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

Fiction is empathy technology.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

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.

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.

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

The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.

The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

[Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies.

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.

A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.

... people notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning.

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.

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.

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.

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

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

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

I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

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

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

Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.

When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.

We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.

I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception

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

A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.