Pinker Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Pinker
Pinker Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Pinker quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
— Steven Pinker
In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
— Steven Pinker
Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes.
— Steven Pinker
The conscious mind - the self or soul - is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.
— Steven Pinker
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.
— Steven Pinker
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
— Steven Pinker
By all measures men are the more violent gender.
— Steven Pinker
The realization of the perfect riposte three hours after the argument: hindser, stairwit, retrotort, afterism.
— Steven Pinker
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
— Steven Pinker
But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.
— 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
Beelzebug n. Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
— Steven Pinker
Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.
— Steven Pinker
Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.
— Steven Pinker
The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly: (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.
— Steven Pinker
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
— Steven Pinker
The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.
— Steven Pinker
M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
— Steven Pinker
I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.
— Steven Pinker
Fiction is empathy technology.
— Steven Pinker
Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.
— Steven Pinker
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
— Steven Pinker
The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator.
— Steven Pinker
I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs.
— Steven Pinker
Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.
— Steven Pinker
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.
— Steven Pinker
Man has no nature; what he has is history.
— Steven Pinker
We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.
— 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 typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt ... ," but "If ... then ... else.
— Steven Pinker
The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
— Steven Pinker
People notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning.
— Steven Pinker
Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.
— Steven Pinker
Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. - Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
— Daniel C. Dennett
We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing
— Steven Pinker
Today the campaign for world government lives on mainly among kooks and science fiction fans.
— Steven Pinker
To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And
— Steven Pinker
The world has far too much morality.
— 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
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
— Steven Pinker
meinstein n. My son, the genius.
— Steven Pinker
I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.
— Steven Pinker
What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status. Now
— 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
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
— Steven Pinker
Shoeburyness n. The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from someone else's bottom.
— Steven Pinker
We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.
— Steven Pinker
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
— Steven Pinker
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
— Steven Pinker
The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.
— Steven Pinker
I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
— Steven Pinker
Journalists assigned to an issue often cover the coverage, creating the notorious media echo chamber.
— Steven Pinker
Mitigate and credible and credulous. What this means
— Steven Pinker
sarchasm n. The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
— Steven Pinker
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
— 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
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach. — W. D. Snodgrass
Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.
— 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
As soon as you add an intensifier, you're turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scale.
— Steven Pinker
You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.
— Steven Pinker
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
— 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
events that occur at random will seem to come in clusters, because it would take a nonrandom process to space them out.
— Steven Pinker
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
— Steven Pinker
By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined "despotism" down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers. At
— Steven Pinker
The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood.
— Steven Pinker
Smarter people tend to think more like economists
— Steven Pinker
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.
— Steven Pinker
One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire.
— Steven Pinker
Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster,
— Steven Pinker
Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth.
— Steven Pinker
Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.
— Steven Pinker
PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect.
— Steven Pinker
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.2
— Steven Pinker
Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.
— Steven Pinker
The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them,
— Steven Pinker
The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know.
— Steven Pinker
Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.
— Steven Pinker
Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators.
— Steven Pinker
Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.
— Steven Pinker
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
— Steven Pinker
Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't.
— Steven Pinker
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
— Steven Pinker
The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.
— Steven Pinker
