All Steven Pinker Quotes
- You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs. Believe
- As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other… Academic
- Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the… Across
- If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it… Absence
- People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the… Assumption
- Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in… Aggressive
- Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer… Always Handy
- I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress… Built
- I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and… Attractive
- Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each… Any
- Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply… Articulate
- People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but… Acceptance
- There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if… Ape
- Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So… Alter
- A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies… Become Violent
- A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a… Arbitrary
- Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the… Academics
- America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of… America
- An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar… Amount
- An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to… Beauty