751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

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

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.

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.

An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

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

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.