All Steven Pinker Quotes
- Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom… Arbitrary
- The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs. Interact
- We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for… All
- The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a… Along
- Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or… All
- The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as… All
- After their return from Babylon, the practice of human sacrifice died out among the Jews, but survived as an ideal in one of its break-away… Accepted
- All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their… All
- People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous. Consider
- The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of… Acts
- In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's… Best
- The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years. Centuries
- Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance,… Admit
- A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive… Clarity
- All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. Activity
- Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent. Anarchy
- As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender. All
- We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in… Close
- The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make… Different Species
- You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of… Behind