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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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 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

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

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

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

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 me...

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

Steven Pinker

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

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

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

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

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

Steven Pinker

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

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

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

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