Steven Pinker Quotes

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

Morality is not only taught; it is caught.

We should reserve the notion of 'morality' for the ways in which we can affect one another's experience for better or worse. Some people use the term 'morality' differently, of course, but I think we have a scientific responsibility to focus the conversation so as to make it most useful.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

Morality is a social necessity

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

Modern morality is all about perception.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

Those ethical choices often are made every day at a time, minute by minute in ways that you may not even relate to ethics, so I'm going to walk them through the whole story from that perspective and hopefully they'll be able to walk away with something good from it.

Morality is the weakness of the brain.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

There is no system that is inherently moral if the participants themselves are not.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.