Words matter. These are the best Steven Pinker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.
In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
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.
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.
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.
Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that’s going to expand.
The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.
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.
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.
Personality and socialization aren’t the same thing.
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of… our mental faculties.
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.
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.
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking – watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
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?
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.
My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
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.
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
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.
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.
I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.
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.
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
In any dispute, each side thinks it’s in the right and the other side is demons.
With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
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.
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
I don’t consider myself to be that radical a thinker.
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
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.
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.
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
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.
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.
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
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.
You can’t hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.
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.
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?
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.
Everyone’s pedigree merges into everyone else’s pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
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?’
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
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.
