Steven Pinker Quotes

Man as a pure animal does not exist.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Freedom was conditioned by man's physical body, heredity, and environment.

One of our great thematic traditions in Bad Religion has been to question human nature.

It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day.

Nobody's born evil. I guess that's why we're drawn to violence. We're fascinated by it, but there's a moral in how you examine it.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

We can't legislate human nature.

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

Human nature is what Heaven supplies.

I didn't study English literature - I studied philosophy at university - so Kierkegaard, Nietzsche - these people are among the most important writers to me. So my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling.

Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

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.

The great question, whether man is of nature or above her.

Human nature fascinates me.

Any human being is this wonderful conglomeration of experiences and behaviors, if you like - some of them healthy, some of them not so healthy.

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.

Without even knowing why, we believe that to learn how to be human - which we have many years to do, for human beings have longer childhoods than any other species, a feature that to biologists and philosophers alike is one of our race's distinguishing characteristics - children must be surrounded by animal imagery.

A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.

All of my work is sort of fed by a question, a need to understand the world and why the world is what it is.