Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— 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

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— 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

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a…

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor,…

— Steven Pinker

The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit…

— Steven Pinker

One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning…

— Steven Pinker

“The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One…

— Steven Pinker

But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

— Steven Pinker

We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like…

— Steven Pinker

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.

— Steven Pinker

“In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to…

— Steven Pinker

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

— Steven Pinker

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…

— Steven Pinker