751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38.

  • Share

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    I don’t think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.

  • Share

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    We’re living in primate heaven. We’re warm, dry, we’re not hungry, we don’t have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?

  • Share

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend.

  • Share

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket. But these are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights.

  • Share

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.

  • Share

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    There’s a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it’s fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, ‘Why even try to work toward peace if we’re just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?’

  • Share

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.

  • Share

  • Author Steven Pinker
  • Quote

    A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace.

  • Share