Steven Pinker Quotes

An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.

The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.

I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

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 and so on.

But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

'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 with genocide and war.

Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.

Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.

Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.

However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.

the mind is a neural computer

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

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 wealth.

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 of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.

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 possibility of compromise

Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.

Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy.

If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time.

Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.

Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.'

I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.

In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.

Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

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 in a major journal.

Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.

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 malevolent powers.

Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

By all measures men are the more violent gender.

As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.