I’m very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. – Steven Pinker
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. – Steven Pinker
My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance. – Steven Pinker
Tom Hanks, who starred in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare. – Steven Pinker
I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology – that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. – Steven Pinker
‘Capitalism’ is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war. – Steven Pinker
Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject. – Steven Pinker
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. – 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 involuntarily by the listener, you can’t will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means. – 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
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
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
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. – Steven Pinker
There’s guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. – Steven Pinker
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. – Steven Pinker
If you aren’t just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them. – 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
However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution. – 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
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs. – 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
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. – Steven Pinker
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’ – Steven Pinker
My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries. – Steven Pinker
I think that if you were to probe a lot of people’s religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest. – 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
We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. – Steven Pinker
You can’t hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. – Steven Pinker