Steven Pinker Quotes About Human Nature

Quotes about: Human Nature

• When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, War, Thinking

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.14, Penguin

• Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

  Steven Pinker

  Self, Empathy, Violence

• Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.

  Steven Pinker

  Dream, Selfish, Book

  "How the Mind Works". Book by Steven Pinker, 1997.

• Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Human Nature, Scholar

  "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

• With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

  Steven Pinker

  Violence, Problem, Human Nature

  "What Comes Naturally" by Louis Menand, www.newyorker.com. November 25, 2002.

• Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

  Steven Pinker

  Psychology, Four, Human Nature

  "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

• The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.

  Steven Pinker

  Numbers, Psychology, Tasks

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.517, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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.

  Steven Pinker

  World, Language, Human Nature

• But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.

  Steven Pinker

  Meaningful, Struggle, Believe

  "Q&A: Steven Pinker of 'Blank Slate'". Interview with Steve Sailer, www.upi.com. October 30, 2002.

• My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

  Steven Pinker

  Opinion, Philosopher, Human Nature

  "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

• The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

  Steven Pinker

  Book, Political, Enlightenment

  "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 8, 2002.

• The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.

  Steven Pinker

  Dream, Pursuit Of Happiness, Desire

  "Steven Pinker: the optimistic voice of science" by Andrew Anthony, www.theguardian.com. September 17, 2011.

• Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.

  Steven Pinker

  Believe, Men, Choices

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