Stephen Pinker

“People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murder with an IQ…

— Stephen Pinker

“This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one's piety. That mentality cannot coexist…

— Stephen Pinker

“Fundamental values (such as equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual conjecture about blank slates that might…

— Stephen Pinker

“Discrimination -in the sense of sustaining a statistical predictive trait of an individual’s group to make a decision about the individual -is…

— Stephen Pinker

“Chomsky's writings are "classics" in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

— Stephen Pinker

“The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows…

— Stephen Pinker

“Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse subcultures don't always see it that way.…

— Stephen Pinker

“[C]ulture, for all its importance, is not some miasma that seeps into people through their skin. Culture relies on neural circuitry that…

— Stephen Pinker

“The general valorization of reason and evidence, scrutiny of social arrangements, open discourse and a reasonable scepticism have all been very healthy…

— Stephen Pinker