Steven Pinker Quotes

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Steven Pinker

Profession : Scientist

Birth : September 18, 1954

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.

Steven Pinker

If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.

Steven Pinker

I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

Steven Pinker

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 especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.

Steven Pinker

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

Steven Pinker

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 spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Steven Pinker

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

Steven Pinker

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 system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

Steven Pinker

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 communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.

Steven Pinker

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 than on resource scarcity.

Steven Pinker

I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs.

Steven Pinker

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Steven Pinker

The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.

Steven Pinker

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

Steven Pinker

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.

Steven Pinker

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.

Steven Pinker