Steven Pinker Short Quotes

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We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.

Steven Pinker
Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

Steven Pinker
I predict it will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology.

Steven Pinker
The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt...," but "If... then... else.

Steven Pinker
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.

Steven Pinker
Some people worry that slang will somehow corrupt the language. We should be so lucky.

Steven Pinker
Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

Steven Pinker
Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.

Steven Pinker
We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.

Steven Pinker
Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

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

Steven Pinker
The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

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
The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.

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
Language is obviously as different from other animals' communication systems as the elephant's trunk is different from other animals' nostrils.

Steven Pinker
Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.

Steven Pinker
As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.

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
Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Steven Pinker
As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.

Steven Pinker
The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise

Steven Pinker
Working out what it would take to program goodness into a robot shows not only how much machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with.

Steven Pinker
Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.

Steven Pinker
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

Steven Pinker