Steven Pinker Quotes

Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.

Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body and mind, as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he.

All rights are individual. We do not get our rights because we belong to a group. Whether it's homosexuals, women, minorities, it leads us astray. You don't get your rights belonging to your group. A group can't force themselves on anybody else. So there should be no affirmative action for any group.

I don't like to be pigeonholed; I don't like when people won't see me for something because they don't think I can do it. I always feel like, at least give me the shot.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

It doesn't matter what color, sex, religion, age, sexual orientation, etc., everyone should have the same freedoms and liberties.

I don't believe we ought to be discriminating against people for their private lives.

That's what liberalism is all about, is promoting incompetence on the basis it's fair, because people would be the best if they weren't discriminated against.

Now we Democrats believe that America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else, and it doesn't matter whether we are black or Hispanic, or disabled or women.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

We're not all equal, it's simply not true. That isn't science.

Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL)One man's rights should not be sacrificed for another's prejudices. ...

In our insistence upon equality of opportunity has our system advanced beyond all the world.

Modern liberal societies cannot be based on a simple assertion of group identity - the very idea of the rule of law, of equal legal treatment for everyone regardless of religion, wealth, gender or ethnicity, conflicts with it.

Equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none.

All inequality that has no special utility to justify it is injustice.

We’re not here to bring politics to our morality, but to bring morality to our politics.

Superior ability is not the exclusive possession of any one race or any one class.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they're men or women.

No one can be considered untouchable on political grounds.

There are so many more women and men who deserve opportunities. People of color. Period.

No individual, regardless of where they live or whom they love, should suffer discrimination.

We are building a country where a person's prospects are determined by their own initiative and hard work and not by the color of their skin, place of birth, gender, language, or income of their parents.

I think this country is genuinely a meritocracy.