All Steven Pinker Quotes
- 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
- As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published… Children
- As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one… Course
- Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare… Ancient
- But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses. Brain
- By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful… Colorings
- 'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated… Capitalism
- Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance… Armed
- Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or… Best
- Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid… Anecdotes
- Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism. Any