Steven Pinker Quotes

I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.

I don't know why people question the academic training of an athlete. Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.

I've said all along it's a humbling experience being at UCLA. Extremely proud, extremely blessed to be at an institution with all this tradition.

I want to prove you don't need to have academic syntax to be intelligent.

My high school was a private school where you went to an Ivy League. That's just what was expected of you and nothing less. So I grew up never being okay with a 'B' because a 'B' was not good enough.

Popularizing - much less venturing beyond one's secure turf - was frowned upon for many years. I think I probably internalized the prohibition, even though I was - and knew I was - among the best speakers and writers of my age cohort. I don't mean I was the best historian - a quite different measure.

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

McGeorge Bundy was a brilliant man who'd had a meteoric academic career and was the youngest man ever to be dean of the Harvard faculty. But he was also arrogant and looked upon all sorts of people and politicians as not to be taken all that seriously.

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by 'sophisticated' methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

There is a tendency of people to try to make you believe only a few people are smart. As a brain surgeon, I know better than that.

The intelligent are to the intelligentsia what a gentleman is to a gent.

I have proven to the world that I am articulate, I am very intelligent, I'm well exposed.

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.

I make fun of Mensa. I don't know a great deal about Mensa - that's the high IQ group - but I say, 'To get into Mensa, you have to have a high IQ, and once you get in, you spend your time congratulating people who are in Mensa with you.' To me that's a pretty stupid way to spend your life.

I actually had a lot of very smart peers.

Harvard is nerd rehab. You have to check yourself in. Those who seek a school filled with self-proclaimed 'nerds,' seek elsewhere. Dropping the H bomb may brand you as an intellectual or a Kennedy. But it will not give you much nerd cred. And that's a good thing.

I was quite nerdy at school. I skipped a year and won a scholarship in chemistry.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

I was a very studious student and usually got A's. I did not like school, because I wasn't popular - I was a nerd.

While MIT and the University of Chicago duke it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Harvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvard is 'cool.'

All my kids are brilliant.

Millions of people would give literally anything to get their kids into a school like Harvard, and millions more simple admire it as another, brighter world.