Steven Pinker Quotes & Sayings

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

The population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion, which is about two and a half times the population in 1800, four and a half times that in 1600, seven times that in 1300, and fifteen times that of 1 CE. So the death count of a war in 1600, for instance, would have to be multiplied by 4.5 for us to compare its destructiveness to those in the middle of the 20th century.9 — Steven Pinker

Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it's a more inviting one. — Steven Pinker

One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected. — Steven Pinker

Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfect circles. The world is close enough to the idealization that the theorems can usefully be applied. Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. As long as there is no outright coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, the world is close enough to the idealization of free will that moral theory can meaningfully be applied to it. — Steven Pinker

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

As we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of. — Steven Pinker

If [t]he mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, selfrespect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are "biological" but that thinking and decision making are something else. — Steven Pinker

The enmeshing of polysemy with grammar is also visible in one of the ways that Americans and Britons are divided by their common language. When a product gives its name to an employer, the name is singular in the United States (The Globe is expanding its comics section) but plural in the United Kingdom (The Guardian are giving you the chance to win books). — Steven Pinker

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries. — Steven Pinker

The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust.111 Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination. 112 And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle - a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was ethnic cleansing. — Steven Pinker

I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game. — Steven Pinker

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 power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest. — Steven Pinker

Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today's Republican party, just as the two Georges - the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern - found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972. — Steven Pinker

Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around them. — Steven Pinker

Of this, to repeat, means that nuclear terrorism is impossible, only that it is not, as so many people insist, imminent, inevitable, or highly probable. — Steven Pinker

mounted hordes from the steppes, such as the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks, Magyars, Tatars, Mughals, and Manchus. For two thousand years these warriors deployed meticulously crafted composite bows (made from a glued laminate of wood, tendon, and horn) to run up immense body counts in their sackings and raids. These tribes were responsible for numbers 3, 5, 11, and 15 on the top-twenty-one list, and they take four of the top six slots in the population-adjusted ranking. — Steven Pinker

When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of interacting applies to a current relationship, the result can range from blank incomprehension to acute discomfort or outright hostility. Think abut a dinner guest offering to pay the host for her meal, a person barking an order to a friend, or an employee helping himself to a shrimp off the boss' plate. Misunderstandings in which one person thinks of a transaction in terms of Equality Matching and another thinks in terms of Market Pricing are even more pervasive and can be even more dangerous. They tap into very different psychologies, one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned, and clashes between them have been common in economic history. — Steven Pinker

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency" - the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why? — Steven Pinker

The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38 — 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

The violence of men, though, is modulated by a slider: they can allocate their energy along a continuum from competing with other men for access to women to wooing the women themselves and investing in their children, a continuum that biologists sometimes call "cads versus dads."103 In a social ecosystem populated mainly by men, the optimal allocation for an individual man is at the "cad" end, because attaining alpha status is necessary to beat away the competition and a prerequisite to getting within wooing distance of the scarce women. — Steven Pinker

For these reasons, oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle hormone. The reuse of the hormone in so many forms of human closeness supports a suggestion by Batson that maternal care is the evolutionary precursor of other forms of human sympathy. — Steven Pinker

There is a maddening phenomenon of social dynamics variously called pluralistic ignorance, the spiral of silence, and the Abilene paradox, after an anecdote in which a Texan family takes an unpleasant trip to Abilene one hot afternoon because each member thinks the others want to go.274 People may endorse a practice or opinion they deplore because they mistakenly think that everyone else favors it. — Steven Pinker

The dread of a permanently wicked human nature takes two forms. One is a practical fear: that social reform is a waste of time because human nature is unchangeable. The other is a deeper concern, which grows out of the Romantic belief that what is natural is good. According to the worry, if scientists suggest it is "natural" - part of human nature - to be adulterous, violent, ethnocentric, and selfish, they would be implying that these traits are good, not just unavoidable. — Steven Pinker

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 sects, which believed that God accepted the torture-sacrifice of an innocent man in exchange for not visiting a worse fate on the rest of humanity. The sect is called Christianity. — Steven Pinker

meinstein n. My son, the genius. — Steven Pinker

The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance. — Steven Pinker

Human selfishness being what it is, almost everyone kept the pleasant task for themselves. — Steven Pinker

Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms. — Steven Pinker

The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator. — Steven Pinker

People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary's malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife. — Steven Pinker

The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself. — Steven Pinker

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 that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason. — Steven Pinker

Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on. — Steven Pinker

Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young. — Steven Pinker

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on. — Steven Pinker

By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined "despotism" down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers. At — Steven Pinker

So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species. — Steven Pinker

Capitalism saved the world, and there is even a heretical theory now, moving up from the level of individuals to countries: countries that trade more and have more open economies are less likely to fight wars and less likely to have genocides. — Steven Pinker

As we saw in chapter 3, one way the early modern Europeans used Odyssean self-control was to keep sharp knives out of reach at the dinner table. — Steven Pinker

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.
[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005] — Steven Pinker

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page. — Steven Pinker

In fact, these reference works, with their careful attention to history, literature, and actual usage, are the most adamant debunkers of grammatical nonsense. (This is less true of style sheets drawn up by newspapers and professional societies, and of manuals written by amateurs such as critics and journalists, which tend to mindlessly reproduce the folklore of previous guides.) — Steven Pinker

If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatorics. Metaphor allows the mind to use a few basic ideas-substance, location, force, goal-to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones. — Steven Pinker

Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? — 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

endless loop, n. See loop, endless.

loop, endless, n,. See endless loop. — Steven Pinker

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response. — Steven Pinker

The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols. — Steven Pinker

Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other. — Steven Pinker

The Victim's Narrative: The story begins long before the harmful act, which was just the latest incident in a long history of mistreatment. The perpetrator's actions were incoherent, senseless, incomprehensible. Either that or he was an abnormal sadist, motivated only by a desire to see me suffer, though I was completely innocent. The harm he did is grievous and irreparable, with effects that will last forever. None of us should ever forget it. They — Steven Pinker

Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth. — Steven Pinker

A bit less obvious is the metaphor for human history, course, which refers to a path of running or flowing, as in the course of a river, a racecourse, and a headlong course. The metaphor is that A SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IS MOTION ALONG A PATHWAY, a special case of the TIME IS MOTION metaphor we met in the previous chapter. — Steven Pinker

( ... ) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth. — Steven Pinker

The teachers introduced a program that explicitly trained the students to construct coherent arguments, with a focus on the connections between successive ideas. It was a radical shift from the kind of assignment that dominates high school writing instruction today, in which students are asked to write memoirs and personal reflections. The students showed dramatic improvements in their test scores in several subjects, and many more of them graduated from high school and applied to college. It's no coincidence that — Steven Pinker

Sconser n. A person who looks around while talking to you to see if there's anyone more interesting about. — Steven Pinker

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect. — Steven Pinker

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions. — 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

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 a favor, who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse. And being the first to get a piece of gossip is like engaging in insider trading: You can capitalize on an opportunity before anyone else can. — Steven Pinker

You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself. — Steven Pinker

It begins with skepticism.147 The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. — Steven Pinker

Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand? — Steven Pinker

They left. Among the many dumb rules of paragraphing foisted on students in composition courses is the one that says that a paragraph may not consist of a single sentence. Wilkerson ends a richly descriptive introductory chapter with a paragraph composed of exactly two syllables. The abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the bottom of the page mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that lay ahead. Good writing finishes strong. — Steven Pinker

I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated. — 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

Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: non, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life. — Steven Pinker

Friendship, like other kinds of altruism, is vulnerable to cheaters, and we have a special name for them: fair-weather friends. These sham friends reap the benefits of associating with a valuable person and mimic signs of warmth in an effort to become valued themselves. But when a little rain falls, they are nowhere in sight. — 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

The realization is disconcerting because it suggests that in a given disagreement, the other guy might have a point, we may not be as pure as we think, the two sides will come to blows each convinced that it is in the right, and no one will think the better of it because everyone's self-deception is invisible to them. For — Steven Pinker

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can. — Steven Pinker

Though it isn't obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney , the tales are filled with murder,infanticide,cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse - grimm fairy tales indeed. — Steven Pinker

The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd. — Steven Pinker

Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can't leak your hidden intentions if you don't think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people. — Steven Pinker

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. — Steven Pinker

In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times! — Steven Pinker

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. — Steven Pinker

The final word on the political non-implications of group differences must go to Gloria Steinem: There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone. — Steven Pinker

As soon as you add an intensifier, you're turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scale. — Steven Pinker

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts. — Steven Pinker

The momentary confusion experienced by everyone in the vicinity when a cell phone rings and no one is sure if it is his/hers or not: conphonesion, phonundrum, ringchronicity, ringxiety, fauxcellarm, pandephonium. — Steven Pinker

A broader danger of unverifiable beliefs is the temptation to defend them by violent means. People become wedded to their beliefs, because the validity of those beliefs reflects on their competence, commends them as authorities, and rationalizes their mandate to lead. Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali was the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. — Steven Pinker

Trend-setters are members of upper classes who adopt the styles of lower classes to differentiate themselves from middle classes, who wouldn't be caught dead in lower-class styles because they're the ones in danger of being mistaken for them. — Steven Pinker

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. — Steven Pinker

What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status. Now — Steven Pinker

The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to. — Steven Pinker

Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels ... Our minds evolved ... to solve problems, [not] ... to answer any question we are capable of asking. — Steven Pinker

And so they opened the door to the idea that in the name of future peace, any and all means might be justified - including even exterminatory war."108 Kant himself despised this turn, noting that such a war "would allow perpetual peace only upon the graveyard of the whole human race." And the American framers, equally aware of the crooked timber of humanity, were positively phobic about the prospect of imperial or messianic leaders. — Steven Pinker

Julius Caesar was one of the thirty-four Roman emperors (out of the total of forty-nine that reigned until the division of the empire) who were killed by guards, high officials, or members of their own families. — Steven Pinker

empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. — Steven Pinker

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal. — Steven Pinker

Together with the topic of a text, the reader usually needs to know its point. He needs to know what the author is trying to accomplish as she explores the topic. — Steven Pinker

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold. — Steven Pinker

Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader's attention and memory. — Steven Pinker

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

[Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies. — Steven Pinker

The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound. — Steven Pinker

Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible's approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own. — Steven Pinker

From the 17th to the 19th century, a cult in India strangled tens of thousands of travelers as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali. — Steven Pinker