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.
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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 clic...

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 oppo...

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 involuntar...

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

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 li...

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

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Pinker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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