Steven Pinker Quotes

we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in...

Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is u...

Thinking is computation, I claim, but that does not mean that the computer is a good metaphor for th...

A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

The Darwinian approach to sex is often attacked as being antifeminist, but that is just wrong. Indee...

Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oeno...

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfis...

Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing...

At first happiness might seem like just desserts for biological fitness (more accurately, the states...

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

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for exa...

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

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

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

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

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

Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institut...

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

One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the develo...

Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a s...

Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for genera...

In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by th...

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

The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the r...

Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights,...

As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, “Life was better since the g...

More to the point, what was the lesson that the first Christians drew from crucifixion? Today such a...

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic...

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural mem...

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale....

The universality of reason is a momentous realization, because it defines a place for morality. If I...

Lewis Richardson wrote that his quest to analyze peace with numbers sprang from two prejudices. As a...

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

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

Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” We can obsess not just ov...

States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in the...

Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner driv...

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

The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by ...

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

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that...

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glo...

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

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

An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortun...

Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that i...

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

Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ri...

The 21st century has certainly seen the rape of women in wartime, but it has long been treated as an...

Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several p...

Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls o...

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

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

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even ...

The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism,...

Many criminologists believe that the source of the state’s pacifying effect isn’t just its brute coe...

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

The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the...

People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without ...

The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirt...

But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseled poet who plays ...

It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and f...

God, who is omnipotent, could have softened Pharaoh’s heart, but he hardens it instead, which gives ...

One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in ...

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower....

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

Behavioral science is not for sissies.

As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred b...

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

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are autho...

Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic cli...

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

Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive ...

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordi...

The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. A...

Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the...

Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that v...

Also, even if technocrats provide reasonable estimates of a risk, which itself is an iffy enterprise...

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

They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are health...

If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rathe...

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

George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral...

The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily deva...

What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in whi...

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we ...

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum,...

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn ...

And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fid...

The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. S...

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate....

As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on...

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

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

Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I g...

legal investigation. As Clinton noted, “My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not parti...

Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to...

Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscore...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.

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

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