All Steven Pinker Quotes
- 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… Account
- 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… 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… Atheism
- Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time. Changes
- 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… Absolve
- 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… Children
- 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,… Barely
- Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution Brain
- 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… Calling
- 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… Age
- 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… Anatomical
- 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… Animal
- 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… Achingly
- 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… All
- We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one. Better
- 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… All
- 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… Alien
- 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… Compromise
- 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… Academic
- 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… Already Lost