Steven Pinker quote: "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?"

Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.
STEVEN PINKER

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel...
STEVEN PINKER

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push ...
STEVEN PINKER

So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological pro...
STEVEN PINKER

You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools fo...
STEVEN PINKER

The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and univ...
STEVEN PINKER

Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speec...
STEVEN PINKER

The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalis...
STEVEN PINKER

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that...
STEVEN PINKER

Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is on...
STEVEN PINKER

Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with in...
STEVEN PINKER

Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a prete...
STEVEN PINKER

20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than t...
STEVEN PINKER

When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul All...
STEVEN PINKER

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The ...
STEVEN PINKER

Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,...
STEVEN PINKER

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination t...
STEVEN PINKER

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning a...
STEVEN PINKER

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; tha...
STEVEN PINKER

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to m...
STEVEN PINKER

Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people t...
STEVEN PINKER

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built ...
STEVEN PINKER

I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens,...
STEVEN PINKER

It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemis...
STEVEN PINKER

If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence...
STEVEN PINKER

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spot...
STEVEN PINKER

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family enviro...
STEVEN PINKER

Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity...
STEVEN PINKER

Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless yo...
STEVEN PINKER

Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared t...
STEVEN PINKER

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of...
STEVEN PINKER

Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photog...
STEVEN PINKER

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the audit...
STEVEN PINKER

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative pare...
STEVEN PINKER

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

People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power vo...
STEVEN PINKER

Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. T...
STEVEN PINKER

Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfello...
STEVEN PINKER

What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the ...
STEVEN PINKER

The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconfor...
STEVEN PINKER

You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an an...
STEVEN PINKER

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusi...
STEVEN PINKER

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to oth...
STEVEN PINKER

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested ...
STEVEN PINKER

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, sta...
STEVEN PINKER

If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vi...
STEVEN PINKER

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that ...
STEVEN PINKER

In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
STEVEN PINKER

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natura...
STEVEN PINKER

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These even...
STEVEN PINKER

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

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conce...
STEVEN PINKER

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep...
STEVEN PINKER

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something t...
STEVEN PINKER

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the...
STEVEN PINKER

There's no reason that we should give up that lever on people's behavior - namely, the inhibition sy...
STEVEN PINKER

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have ...
STEVEN PINKER

My students don't even know I'm gone.
STEVEN PINKER

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

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally an...
STEVEN PINKER

The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, an...
STEVEN PINKER

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fle...
STEVEN PINKER

An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predi...
STEVEN PINKER

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way th...
STEVEN PINKER

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learn...
STEVEN PINKER

A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for ...
STEVEN PINKER

Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls th...
STEVEN PINKER

Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amo...
STEVEN PINKER

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were ...
STEVEN PINKER

As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are th...
STEVEN PINKER

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we'...
STEVEN PINKER

'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showi...
STEVEN PINKER

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillin...
STEVEN PINKER

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive lan...
STEVEN PINKER

One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injuncti...
STEVEN PINKER

The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualti...
STEVEN PINKER

A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adju...
STEVEN PINKER

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.
STEVEN PINKER

Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend tha...
STEVEN PINKER

Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale ar...
STEVEN PINKER

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organi...
STEVEN PINKER

I think that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among pundits and i...
STEVEN PINKER

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it...
STEVEN PINKER

For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of...
STEVEN PINKER

If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
STEVEN PINKER

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious...
STEVEN PINKER

The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons lea...
STEVEN PINKER

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is ...
STEVEN PINKER

It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare...
STEVEN PINKER

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connec...
STEVEN PINKER

A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think other...
STEVEN PINKER

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively ove...
STEVEN PINKER

We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant ...
STEVEN PINKER

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life....
STEVEN PINKER

Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robo...
STEVEN PINKER

People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous...
STEVEN PINKER

An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code ...
STEVEN PINKER

The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brai...
STEVEN PINKER

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

No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modificat...
STEVEN PINKER

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences betwe...
STEVEN PINKER

Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use...
STEVEN PINKER

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from eithe...
STEVEN PINKER

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

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

We may be seeing a coming together of the humanities and the science of human nature.
STEVEN PINKER

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture...
STEVEN PINKER

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours...
STEVEN PINKER

In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfe...
STEVEN PINKER

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the ...
STEVEN PINKER

Why is it surprising that scientists might have long hair and wear cowboy boots? In fields like neur...
STEVEN PINKER

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and wor...
STEVEN PINKER

People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have m...
STEVEN PINKER

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People ensl...
STEVEN PINKER

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causat...
STEVEN PINKER

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and ...
STEVEN PINKER

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of b...
STEVEN PINKER

Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those bel...
STEVEN PINKER

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in a...
STEVEN PINKER

In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitel...
STEVEN PINKER

The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note the metaphor) that skeptics are coerce...
STEVEN PINKER

During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that the...
STEVEN PINKER

Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death,...
STEVEN PINKER

Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never...
STEVEN PINKER

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising t...
STEVEN PINKER

Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate wh...
STEVEN PINKER

The media and intelligentsia were partly complicit in Trump's depiction of the world as a dystopia h...
STEVEN PINKER

I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and ...
STEVEN PINKER

Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been...
STEVEN PINKER

Roads, better harnesses for horses, time-keeping devices, financial instruments like a currency that...
STEVEN PINKER

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have...
STEVEN PINKER

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, b...
STEVEN PINKER

My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field...
STEVEN PINKER

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, ever...
STEVEN PINKER

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

Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological ...
STEVEN PINKER

they aren't identical lumps of clay.
STEVEN PINKER

The whole point of international terrorism is to shock the world with the most horrific spectacle im...
STEVEN PINKER

Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.
STEVEN PINKER

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and ...
STEVEN PINKER

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, y...
STEVEN PINKER

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and e...
STEVEN PINKER

I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.
STEVEN PINKER

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an...
STEVEN PINKER

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was ...
STEVEN PINKER

Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of wal...
STEVEN PINKER

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on...
STEVEN PINKER

Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may...
STEVEN PINKER

The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have...
STEVEN PINKER

Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conques...
STEVEN PINKER

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.
STEVEN PINKER

Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral p...
STEVEN PINKER

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibi...
STEVEN PINKER

Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyrann...
STEVEN PINKER

It got ugly. People used this as an occasion to vent a large number of grievances.
STEVEN PINKER

All of us have a theory about human nature.
STEVEN PINKER

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

To make changes you have to make some enemies, but you also have to be careful not too make too many...
STEVEN PINKER

Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the hi...
STEVEN PINKER

People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference bet...
STEVEN PINKER

Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprint...
STEVEN PINKER

If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you shoul...
STEVEN PINKER

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to o...
STEVEN PINKER

When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.
STEVEN PINKER

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical cla...
STEVEN PINKER

The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and ...
STEVEN PINKER

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial o...
STEVEN PINKER

In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Cather...
STEVEN PINKER

Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh...
STEVEN PINKER

Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn...
STEVEN PINKER

When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of interacting applies to a current...
STEVEN PINKER

cademics and intellectuals are culture vultures. In a gathering of today’s elite, it is perfectly ...
STEVEN PINKER

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx...
STEVEN PINKER

The imposition of stigma is the commonest form of violence used in democratic societies.
R. A. PINKER

We are concerned with that curious bunch of nonconformists who explain their participation in negati...
STEVEN BIKO

Most of us have two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands ...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

I'm very fond of the British cinema. I'm a big fan of Martin Campbell and Daniel Craig. I ac...
STEVEN BAUER

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industr...
STEVEN LEVY

I think I look really weird with short hair. So I figured if I've got a mustache, I think it loo...
STEVEN ADAMS

The gift that has been given to me says much about our capacity for great compassion and generosity,...
STEVEN COJOCARU

Most of the kids that I meet in the street are serious hardened criminals that I meet in the street,...
STEVEN SEAGAL

No industry is immune and no occupation is safe. All of us need to begin to think in terms of our ow...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft. I am humbled by ...
STEVEN SINOFSKY

Courtney Love is a loose cannon. She says what she thinks. She's wild on the red carpet. You get...
STEVEN COJOCARU

Black Consciousness seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their ...
STEVEN BIKO

When I was on TV in the '80s, I wasn't thinking, 'There's a 10-year-old kid watching...
STEVEN WRIGHT

Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare...
STEVEN RATTNER

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.
STEVEN WRIGHT

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. ...
STEVEN WRIGHT

'The Color Purple' is the kind of character piece that a director like Sidney Lumet could do...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is...
STEVEN SODERBERGH

I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure.
STEVEN CHU

Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood - these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies o...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded wit...
STEVEN BOCHCO

I was born with this. It's a hereditary genetic condition. This is something you can go your who...
STEVEN COJOCARU

I think there is a way to be formal and elegant and classy, but more modern. Brad Pitt has been chan...
STEVEN COJOCARU

I mean, as long as it doesn't have a bra attached, guys can take a risk and wear stylish things ...
STEVEN TYLER

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. ...
STEVEN WRIGHT

If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happens if you str...
STEVEN WRIGHT

A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space...
STEVEN WRIGHT

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?

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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

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