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People Quotes by Steven Pinker

58 People quotes by Steven Pinker

All People quotes Steven Pinker’s page

Steven Pinker points out that wanting political equality doesn’t mean people are copies of each other. He notes that societies without central rule often see high rates of death from violence. He also reminds us that words are just labels, and that swearing can hit people’s feelings like a sudden push.

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If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to…

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

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I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the…

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Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

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

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

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

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The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they…

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Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the…

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Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs…

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

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It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical…

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Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather…

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One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely…

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Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that…

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If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or…

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

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The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only…

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

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Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects…

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You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to…

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The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests…

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

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Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other…

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Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from…

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

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

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As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

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All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of…

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

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

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The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests…

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Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less…

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As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got…

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As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the…

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When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder…

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In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine…

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

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A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and…

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Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other…

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More by Steven Pinker

Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much…

Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by…

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 learn unless…

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely…

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

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

“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted…

Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,…

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…

“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to…

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or…

“In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch.…

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…