Steven Pinker Quotes

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Steven Pinker

Profession : Scientist

Birth : September 18, 1954

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

Steven Pinker

In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.

Steven Pinker

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.

Steven Pinker

Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.

Steven Pinker

Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.

Steven Pinker

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'

Steven Pinker

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Steven Pinker

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

Steven Pinker

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 others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

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.

Steven Pinker

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 applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.

Steven Pinker

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.

Steven Pinker

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.

Steven Pinker

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.

Steven Pinker

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

Steven Pinker

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Steven Pinker