Top 100 Pinker's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. It's not just that there are two sides to every dispute. It's that each side sincerely believes its version of the story, namely that it is an innocent and long-suffering victim and the other side a malevolent and treacherous sadist.
Steven Pinker
#4. Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
Steven Pinker
#5. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And
Steven Pinker
#6. A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts.
Steven Pinker
#7. If a person did all the work of a slave but had the option of quitting at any time without being physically restrained or punished, we would not call him a slave - and this violence was often a regular part of a slave's life.
Steven Pinker
#8. Reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions.
Steven Pinker
#9. It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.
Steven Pinker
#10. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.
Steven Pinker
#11. 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.
Steven Pinker
#12. People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary's malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife.
Steven Pinker
#13. 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
#14. There is a joke about a commuter who's on his way to work when he gets a call on his mobile phone from his wife. "Be careful, honey," she says. "They just said on the radio that there's a maniac driving on the wrong side of the freeway." "One maniac?" he replies; "There are thousands of them!
Steven Pinker
#15. An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton's world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein's. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.
Steven Pinker
#16. The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it's fine.
Steven Pinker
#17. The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.
Steven Pinker
#18. So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.
Steven Pinker
#19. Hextable n. The record you find in someone else's collection which instantly tells you you could never go out with them.
Steven Pinker
#20. the political scientist James Payne suggests that ancient peoples put a low value on other people's lives because pain and death were so common in their own. This set a low threshold for any practice that had a chance of bringing them an advantage, even if the price was the lives of others.
Steven Pinker
#21. Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible's approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own.
Steven Pinker
#22. By today's sensibilities, it's more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution.
Steven Pinker
#23. 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.
Steven Pinker
#24. It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).
Steven Pinker
#25. This is the kind of writer who gets the ball rolling in his search for the holy grail, but finds that it's neither magic bullet nor a slam dunk, so he rolls with the punches and lets the chips fall where they may while seeing the glass as half-full, which is easier said than done.
Steven Pinker
#26. 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?'
Steven Pinker
#27. And every word has at most one inflectional suffix. We never get opensed or opensing, nor do the plural -s and possessive s stack up when several owners own something: the dogs' blanket, not the dogs's (dogzez) blanket. Finally,
Steven Pinker
#28. I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.
Steven Pinker
#29. 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.
Steven Pinker
#30. 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.
Steven Pinker
#31. In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
Steven Pinker
#32. My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test.
Steven Pinker
#33. Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it's a more inviting one.
Steven Pinker
#34. 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
#35. A woman gets into a taxi in Boston's Logan airport and asks the driver, 'Can you take me somplace where I can get scrod?' He says, 'Gee, that's the first time I've heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.
Steven Pinker
#36. For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?
Steven Pinker
#37. The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader's freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship.
Steven Pinker
#38. 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.
Steven Pinker
#39. 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.
Steven Pinker
#40. I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.
Steven Pinker
#41. And rivaling the Democratic Peace theory as a categorical factoid about modern conflict prevention is the Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war. The only unambiguous Big Mac Attack took place in 1999, when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.234
Steven Pinker
#42. In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.
Steven Pinker
#43. Shoeburyness n. The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from someone else's bottom.
Steven Pinker
#44. World's most widely read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min, and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia.
Steven Pinker
#45. Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.
Steven Pinker
#46. 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.
Steven Pinker
#47. 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.
Steven Pinker
#48. 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
#49. One doesn't have to invoke dominance to explain why Genghis Khan inseminated so many women that his Y chromosome is common in Central Asia today; it's enough to observe that he killed the women's fathers and husbands.
Steven Pinker
#50. When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.
Steven Pinker
#51. Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.
Steven Pinker
#52. Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.
Steven Pinker
#53. Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless
Steven Pinker
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Steven Pinker
#57. Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.
Steven Pinker
#58. I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.
Steven Pinker
#59. 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
#60. Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.
Steven Pinker
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. It's really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym.
Steven Pinker
#64. We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.
Steven Pinker
#65. 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
#66. We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.
Steven Pinker
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.
Steven Pinker
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.2
Steven Pinker
#78. Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures.
Steven Pinker
#79. Laplace's Demon, the hypothetical imp that knows the instantaneous positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, was said to be able to calculate the entire future or past by plugging these values into the equations that express the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism.
Steven Pinker
#80. 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.
Steven Pinker
#81. 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
#82. 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.
Steven Pinker
#83. 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.
Steven Pinker
#84. Sconser n. A person who looks around while talking to you to see if there's anyone more interesting about.
Steven Pinker
#85. 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
#86. Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.
Steven Pinker
#87. Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war.
Steven Pinker
#88. 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
#89. There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.
Steven Pinker
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#96. Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
Steven Pinker
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them,
Steven Pinker
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
