Steven Pinker Quotes

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

Was it really so far-fetched to think that words had a way of shaping a person's whole life?

Those who have reflected on the powerful influence of language on thought will perceive in how different a manner people who speak in different languages are apt to think.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

Language does our thinking for us.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn't exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.

It's other people who make us wise, and I haven't known nearly enough.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.

People may teach what they know, but they reproduce what they are.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.