Steven Pinker — Quotes
Imported from: Clippings/Pinker-Quotes.md
Notes built from this: pinker-selected-works-part-1
Author: Steven Pinker Source: Goodreads
60 quotes, one page each — split at import because this page carried more quoted words than the wiki publishes on a single page.
No book given
- “It’s natural to think that living things must…”
- “Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone’s claim…”
- “Fiction is empathy technology…”
- “Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn…”
- “Of course genes can’t pull the levers of…”
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Book page: pinker-selected-works-part-1
- “Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his…”
- “The scriptures present a God who delights in…”
- “Why should the spread of ideas and people…”
- “Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary…”
- “The only people who should be allowed to…”
- “The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul…”
- “The theory that religion is a force for…”
- “Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an…”
- “In this way of thinking, the fact that…”
- “The indispensability of reason does not imply that…”
- “Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures…”
- “An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that…”
- “The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals…”
- “Once again, the point of this discussion is…”
How the Mind Works
Book page: pinker-selected-works-part-1
- “Just as blueprints don’t necessarily specify blue buildings…”
- “The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can…”
- “Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to…”
- “Why give a robot an order to obey…”
- “Thinking is computation, I claim, but that does…”
- “Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to…”
- “The mind is a neural computer…”
- “The typical imperative from biology is not ‘Thou…”
- “The idea that boys want to sleep with…”
- “Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in…”
The Blank Slate
Book page: pinker-blank-slate
- “Equality is not the empirical claim that all…”
- “Much of what is today called ‘social criticism’…”
- “Feminism as a movement for political and social…”
- “Nature is a hanging judge,’ goes an old…”
- “We are all members of the same flawed…”
- “Disgust is intuitive microbiology…”
- “The foundation of individual rights is the assumption…”
- “People do more for their fellows than return…”
- “Though many of my arguments will be coolly…”
- “Nothing invests life with more meaning than the…”
- “I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go…”
Enlightenment Now
Book page: pinker-enlightenment-now
- “One student asks: Why should I live? Steven…”
- “Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become…”
- “As we care about more of humanity, we’re…”
- “What is progress? You might think that the…”
- “The standard explanation of the madness of crowds…”
- “The first step toward wisdom is the realization…”
- “Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political…”
- “Remember your math: an anecdote is not a…”
- “People see violence as moral, not immoral: across…”
- “A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had…”
- “Our understanding of who we are, where we…”
Words and Rules
Book page: pinker-words-rules
The Stuff of Thought
Book page: pinker-stuff-thought
The Sense of Style
- “Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear…”
- “The better you know something, the less you…”
- “As people age, they confuse changes in themselves…”
- “In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool…”
- “Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between…”
The Language Instinct
Book page: pinker-language-instinct