Steven Pinker Quotes

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

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.

- Steven Pinker

Roads, better harnesses for horses, time-keeping devices, financial instruments like a currency that was recognized everywhere in the kingdom, enforceable contracts - all of this made commerce more appealing than plunder.

- Steven Pinker

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

- Steven Pinker

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

- Steven Pinker

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.

- Steven Pinker

I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.

- Steven Pinker

We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them.

- 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

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

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 you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.

- Steven Pinker

Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

- 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

Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism.

- Steven Pinker

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

- Steven Pinker

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

- Steven Pinker

Why is it surprising that scientists might have long hair and wear cowboy boots? In fields like neuroscience, where the events you are recording are so minute, I suspect scientists cultivate a boring, reliable image. A scientist with a reputation for flamboyance might be suspect.

- 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

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

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

- Steven Pinker

For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'

- 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

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

Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.

- 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

Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.

- Steven Pinker

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.

- Steven Pinker

'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.

- 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

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 reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

- Steven Pinker

Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.

- Steven Pinker

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

- Steven Pinker

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.

- Steven Pinker

Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.

- Steven Pinker

As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.

- 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

Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement.

- Steven Pinker

Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.

- Steven Pinker

People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.

- Steven Pinker

I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.

- 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

A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.

- Steven Pinker

The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.

- 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

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.

- 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

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

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

- Steven Pinker

For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

- Steven Pinker

I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.

- 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

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

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.

- Steven Pinker

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

- Steven Pinker

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

- Steven Pinker

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.

- Steven Pinker

Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.

- Steven Pinker

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test.

- 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

Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.

- Steven Pinker

It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.

- 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

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

- Steven Pinker

You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.

- 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

No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.

- Steven Pinker

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

- 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

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

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.

- Steven Pinker

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.

- Steven Pinker

There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities.

- Steven Pinker

Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance.

- Steven Pinker

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

- 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

Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

- Steven Pinker

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.

- Steven Pinker

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

- 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

Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.

- Steven Pinker

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.

- 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

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.

- Steven Pinker

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

- Steven Pinker

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

- Steven Pinker

If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.

- Steven Pinker

People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

- 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

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

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

- 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

I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives.

- 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

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

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

- Steven Pinker

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

- 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

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

- Steven Pinker

If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.

- 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

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

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.

- 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

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.

- 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

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

- 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

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

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

- 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

The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.

- Steven Pinker

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

- Steven Pinker

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.

- Steven Pinker

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.

- 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

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

- Steven Pinker

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

- 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

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.

- Steven Pinker

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.

- 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

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

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.

- Steven Pinker

You don't like to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin of life or the fate of the planet?

- Steven Pinker

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

- Steven Pinker

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.

- 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

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

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

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject.

- Steven Pinker

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.

- Steven Pinker

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

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

- Steven Pinker

Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.

- 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

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

Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.

- Steven Pinker

It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.

- Steven Pinker

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

- Steven Pinker

Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

- 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

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

- Steven Pinker

Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.

- Steven Pinker

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

- Steven Pinker

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

- Steven Pinker

Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.

- 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

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

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.

- Steven Pinker

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

- 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

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

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

- Steven Pinker

By all measures men are the more violent gender.

- 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

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

- Steven Pinker

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

- Steven Pinker