Steven Pinker World Quotations

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

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.

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.

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.

We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.

The world has far too much morality.

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