Steven Pinker Quotes

Somewhere between the intellectual idea of why we're attracted to certain things and the pragmatic reality is some form of ever-evolving truth.

An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.

In many cases, it's a choice. There are many, many human beings through history - millions and millions and millions - who have been both homosexual at times in their lives and then heterosexual, or vice-versa, or bisexual. How can it be a biological imperative if people can change?

In no culture ever studied have women repeatedly preferred to mate with pear-shaped, low-status, tepid men possessing high-pitched, nasal voices.

Most relationships probably start with people going, 'Meh, it's probably best not to be embarking in this relationship.' We do it, though, because our brains are wired to make babies or whatever.

All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.

The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous. Women are sex objects. If women weren't sex objects, there wouldn't be another generation. It's the attraction between the sexes that makes the world go 'round. That's why women wear lipstick and short skirts.

If you're gay, you're gay. It's my Dennis Miller theory of homosexuality shot through the movie "Boy and the Dolphin." If you're a 12-year-old boy and you're watching the movie "Boy and a Dolphin" and a 27-year-old Sofia Loren crawls up out of the Aegean Sea after sponge diving, she's standing there in the deck of the boat in a see-through gauze top, rivulets of water dripping off her torso onto the deck of the boat. If you're a 12-year-old boy and you're watching that and you still want to make it with the captain of the boat, you're gay. You can't fight that. So it is what it is.

Scientists still know less about what attracts men than they do about what attracts mosquitoes.

We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.

I’m sure you gathered this by now: I just do what I want. Have I made out with chicks? Hell yeah. Did I think it was awesome? Hell yeah. I wouldn’t call myself bi. Like, if I didn’t eat meat for a week, it doesn’t make me a vegetarian. So I like people, and that’s just it. I like people.

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.

I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

People will do amazing things to ensure their survival.

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.

I'm naturally inclined to have sex with every beautiful woman I see. But that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Like most Beta Males, he didn't realize that being a good guy was not necessarily an attraction to women.

Love is not necessary for sex.

Sexual attraction keeps throwing self-interest off course.

men are attracted to beauty because it indicates health and youth—no point mating with a sickly woman who won’t be around to raise the children.

We made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

We are attracted to people who have traits we want in ourselves, and usually we are unattracted to people with traits that we share.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.