Steven Pinker Quotes

the day Johannes Gutenberg finished his wooden printing press in 1440. Western civilization turned onto a path toward more efficient, accessible communication of knowledge.]

You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Hollywood likes to put out their own message out a lot of times, and that message isn't the best one for everyone.

Among the earliest modern commodities were printed books … and their shrinking price and increased availability were far more historically momentous than, say, the spread of the internal combustion engine.

If you think about it, the printing press allowed everyone to print books - it democratised the printing of information. For the first time, we could all print.

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

I think TV, at least most immediately, perhaps more so than film, is a reflection of society.

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.

We will fight ignorance and a lack of information with information.

Richard Hoggart's cultural analysis 'The Uses of Literacy' was published in 1957, but its influence still hovers over anyone setting out to write seriously about people's affection for things that aren't serious, such as the products of pop culture.

My mission is to put a book in every child's hand.

TV is the most powerful medium, which has taken me right into the homes of so many people.

It would be exciting to take part in what we now call the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, but with modern dentistry.

I did my BMS from Bhavan's College in Mumbai and a post-graduate diploma in journalism and mass communication.

The book has had a good run. For 550 years, it was the most practical way to deliver writing to multiple readers.

The entertainment industry has an effect on social consciousness.

Television has power.

My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book.

Over no nation does the press hold a more absolute control than over the people of America, for the universal education of the poorest classes makes every individual a reader.

A country in which the people are not healthy physically and psychologically, are poorly educated and illiterate, will never rise to the peaks of world civilization.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.