Quotes from Steven Pinker

If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.

A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.

Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

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.

Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'

Roads, better harnesses for horses, time-keeping devices, financial instruments like a currency that was recognized everywhere in the kingdom, enforceable contracts - all of this made commerce more appealing than plunder.

The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.

If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

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.

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.