Humans Quotes by Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and…

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider…

— Steven Pinker

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a…

— Steven Pinker

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to…

— Steven Pinker

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for…

— Steven Pinker

In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in…

— Steven Pinker

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they…

— Steven Pinker

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life,…

— Steven Pinker

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during…

— Steven Pinker

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the…

— Steven Pinker

But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe…

— Steven Pinker

After their return from Babylon, the practice of human sacrifice died out among the Jews, but survived as an ideal in one…

— Steven Pinker

When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power…

— Steven Pinker

I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to…

— Steven Pinker

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to…

— Steven Pinker

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to…

— Steven Pinker

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human…

— Steven Pinker

“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith,…

— Steven Pinker

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we…

— Steven Pinker

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

— Steven Pinker

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about…

— Steven Pinker

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is…

— Steven Pinker

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives…

— Steven Pinker

Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not…

— Steven Pinker

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its…

— Steven Pinker

The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They…

— Steven Pinker

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner…

— Steven Pinker

We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The…

— Steven Pinker

The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like…

— Steven Pinker

Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about…

— Steven Pinker