Steven Pinker

My laptop has freed me to travel.

— Steven Pinker

the mind is a neural computer

— Steven Pinker

“disasters are instant, improvements are gradual”

— Steven Pinker

“smarter people tend to think more like economists”

— Steven Pinker

Fiction is empathy technology.

— Steven Pinker

“Behavioral science is not for sissies.”

— Steven Pinker

I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

— Steven Pinker

Disgust is intuitive microbiology

— Steven Pinker

A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.

— Steven Pinker

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.”

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless

— Steven Pinker

“At every moment we choose, consciously or unconsciously, between good things now and better things later.”

— Steven Pinker

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

— Steven Pinker

Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

— Steven Pinker

Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.

— Steven Pinker

“If a person did all the work of a slave but had the option of quitting at any time without being physically…

— Steven Pinker

I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability…

— Steven Pinker

“Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape…

— Steven Pinker

20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy,…

— Steven Pinker

Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over…

— Steven Pinker

If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must…

— Steven Pinker

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different…

— Steven Pinker

“Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible’s approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of…

— Steven Pinker

“The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with…

— Steven Pinker

“Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” We can obsess not just over what we…

— Steven Pinker

“Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train…

— Steven Pinker

Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words…

— Steven Pinker

The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social…

— Steven Pinker

“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…

— 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

“When a criminal justice system works properly, it’s not because rational actors know that Big Brother is watching them 24/7 and will…

— Steven Pinker

“Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition…

— 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

“Cas Wouters, inspired by conversations with Elias late in his life, suggests that we are living through a new phase in the…

— Steven Pinker

“But any intuition that vegetarianism and humanitarianism go together was shattered in the 20th-century by the treatment of animals under Nazism.266 Hitler…

— Steven Pinker

“Self-control has been credited with one of the greatest reductions of violence in history, the thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and…

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker