751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

One of them is a simple logical point that no matter how important learning and culture and socialization are, they don't happen by magic.

I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

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.

Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. Pornography for men is visual, anatomical, impulsive, floridly promiscuous and devoid of context and character. Erotica for women is far more likely to be verbal, psychological, reflective, serially monogamous and rich in context and character. Men fantasise about copulating with bodies; women fantasise about making love to people.

Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today's Republican party, just as the two Georges - the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern - found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.