Top 100 Pinker Quotes
#1. The brain, like it or not, is a machine. Scientists have come to that conclusion, not because they are mechanistic killjoys, but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. - STEVEN PINKER
Michio Kaku
#2. In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.
Hanya Yanagihara
#3. For however much the Gateses might give away, their daily life remains, by and large, unaffected. They remain, in spite of this enormous donation, one of the wealthiest couples in the world. Mother Teresa, on the other hand, gave up everything to serve the poorest of the poor. Pinker
Gary A. Anderson
#4. The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
W. D. Snodgrass
#5. Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. - Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Daniel C. Dennett
#6. What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker's cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz's moral purpose (building an integrated self).
David Brooks
#7. Lyell became something of a celebrity - the Steven Pinker of his generation - and
Elizabeth Kolbert
#8. Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard professor who has devoted more than ten years to studying the decline in violence, the conclusion is evident: We live in the most peaceful era ever.
Jurriaan Kamp
#9. My cerebral cortex, the gray matter that MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker likens to 'a large sheet of two-dimensional tissue that has been wadded up to fit inside the spherical skull,' is riddled instead of whole.
Floyd Skloot
#10. Henry's face grows pink, pinker than those ridiculous bras Mom recently left on my bed when she decided I needed something more feminine than a sports bra.
Miranda Kenneally
#11. Jes, I've thought about this-"
"Thought of me? Late at night? What was I wearing?"
"I've thought about your powers," Wylan said, cheeks flushing pinker.
Leigh Bardugo
#12. 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.
Steven Pinker
#13. It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
Steven Pinker
#14. The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don't they imitate their parents' habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?),
Steven Pinker
#15. The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
Steven Pinker
#16. 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.
Steven Pinker
#17. 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
#18. The major distinction between the indefinite article, a, and the definite article, the.6 When a character makes his first appearance on stage, he is introduced with a. When we are subsequently told about him, we already know who he is, and he is mentioned with the:
Steven Pinker
#19. As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.
Steven Pinker
#20. States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.
Steven Pinker
#21. We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.
Steven Pinker
#22. Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.
Steven Pinker
#23. We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.
Steven Pinker
#24. It's really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym.
Steven Pinker
#25. 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.
Steven Pinker
#26. As they say, everybody wins. Of course, an exchange at a single moment in time only pays when there is a division of labor.
Steven Pinker
#27. Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.
Steven Pinker
#28. Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.
Steven Pinker
#29. I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.
Steven Pinker
#30. Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.
Steven Pinker
#31. I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Steven Pinker
#32. The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211
Steven Pinker
#33. 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.
Steven Pinker
#34. Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless
Steven Pinker
#35. The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.
Steven Pinker
#36. 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.
Steven Pinker
#37. The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them,
Steven Pinker
#38. 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
#39. The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize litterers) as by the signaling of a social norm: This is the kind of place where people obey the rules.
Steven Pinker
#40. Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
Steven Pinker
#42. 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.
Steven Pinker
#43. 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.
Steven Pinker
#44. I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives.
Steven Pinker
#45. Whatever the pedagogical merits may be of feeding children misinformation, it is inappropriate for adults. There is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with a coordinator.
Steven Pinker
#46. I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
Steven Pinker
#47. Human selfishness being what it is, almost everyone kept the pleasant task for themselves.
Steven Pinker
#48. Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster,
Steven Pinker
#49. By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined "despotism" down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers. At
Steven Pinker
#50. We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from "I think I understand" to "I understand," we need to see the sights and feel the motions.
Steven Pinker
#51. Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
Steven Pinker
#53. Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
Steven Pinker
#54. Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.
Steven Pinker
#55. With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
Steven Pinker
#57. I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs.
Steven Pinker
#58. I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.
Steven Pinker
#59. Experiments that measure readers' comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot.
Steven Pinker
#60. We can remind ourselves of the reasons to strive for good style: to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world.
Steven Pinker
#61. Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism.
Steven Pinker
#62. Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - wholeheartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
Steven Pinker
#63. The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.
Steven Pinker
#64. 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
#65. Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images,
Steven Pinker
#66. 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.
Steven Pinker
#67. Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.
Steven Pinker
#68. 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.
Steven Pinker
#69. The similarity between space and time is limpid enough that we routinely use space to represent time in calendars, hourglasses, and other time-keeping devices. And the cognitive similarity also shows up in everyday metaphors where spatial terms are borrowed to refer to time.
Steven Pinker
#70. 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.
Steven Pinker
#71. My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance.
Steven Pinker
#72. Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick.
Steven Pinker
#73. Though it isn't obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney , the tales are filled with murder,infanticide,cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse - grimm fairy tales indeed.
Steven Pinker
#74. A comparative adjective is appropriate when the two items are being directly contrasted, one against the other; a superlative can work when an item is superior not just to the alternative in view at the time but to a larger implicit comparison group.
Steven Pinker
#75. Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.
Steven Pinker
#76. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader's attention and memory.
Steven Pinker
#77. Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.
Steven Pinker
#78. 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
#79. Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.2
Steven Pinker
#80. 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.
Steven Pinker
#81. So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.
Steven Pinker
#82. Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.
Steven Pinker
#83. 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
#84. The word 'glamour' comes from the word 'grammar', and since the Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules?
Steven Pinker
#85. Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.
Steven Pinker
#86. The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt ... ," but "If ... then ... else.
Steven Pinker
#87. 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
#88. The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.
Steven Pinker
#89. As we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of.
Steven Pinker
#90. People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
Steven Pinker
#91. Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject.
Steven Pinker
#92. The zero-sum nature of the medieval economy was reinforced by a Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.
Steven Pinker
#93. There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
Steven Pinker
#94. I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of ... our mental faculties.
Steven Pinker
#95. 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.
Steven Pinker
#96. It begins with skepticism.147 The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something.
Steven Pinker
#97. There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities.
Steven Pinker
#98. Unlike features of a landscape like trees and mountains, people have feet. They move to places where opportunities are best, and they soon invite their friends and relatives to join them.
Steven Pinker
#99. No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
Steven Pinker
#100. One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire.
Steven Pinker
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