Quotes by Steven Pinker

About Steven Pinker:

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-born American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift

Steven Pinker

They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being.

Steven Pinker

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any a...

Steven Pinker

People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live g...

Steven Pinker

If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullie...

Steven Pinker

Behavioral science is not for sissies.

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 elimi...

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

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

Steven Pinker

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

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

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.

Steven Pinker

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

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

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

Steven Pinker

You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is al...

Steven Pinker

Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accou...

Steven Pinker

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

Steven Pinker

Thinking is computation, I claim, but that does not mean that the computer is a good metaphor for the mind. The mind is a set of modules, but the modules are not encapsulated boxes or circumscribed swatches on the surface of the brain. The organizati...

Steven Pinker

Many textbooks point out that no animal has evolved wheels and cite the fact as an example of how evolution is often incapable of finding the optimal solution to an engineering problem. But it is not a good example at all. Even if nature could have e...

Steven Pinker

Author Bio

  • NameSteven Pinker
  • Descriptionpsychologist, linguist, author
  • BornSeptember 18, 1954
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPsychologist; Linguist; Anthropologist; Philosopher; Writer
  • AwardsRichard Dawkins Award; Humanist Of The Year