Steven Pinker Quotes

248 quotes in 3829 categories

• Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you…
• Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies…
• The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs…
• Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.
• Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any…
• The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy…
• In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology,…
• Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution
• It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went…
• The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude…
• Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is…
• Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and…
• Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed…
• The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people…
• We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
• People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit…
• When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very…
• The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the…
• Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is…
• Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're…

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