Steven Pinker Quotes

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.

Some people are genetically programmed to be difficult.

I've just always sort of been mesmerized by our minds and how people think and how people react differently.

I'm so interested in people's journeys and what makes them tick, the movers and shakers.

I'm very interested in how the brain works and the different personality types. I get my friends to do personality tests, and I see what type they resemble.

The conduct of men depends upon their temperament, not upon a bunch of musty maxims.

No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament".

I have two little kids, and they both came out completely different, with their own personalities.

It's hysterical how kids have their own personalities, even at like 3 or 4. And, it's funny what they tend to like.

All these people who say success changes people; well, no, it just magnifies what's there.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

I'm a very melancholic kind of person. I don't know why; I think certain people are born a certain way.

You know, there's a tremendous amount of genetic propensity not necessarily for what TV shows you like but for literally how you view the world, how you react to things, how things touch you and how things move you.

I think most people are inherently interested in how their brain works, in what makes them tick.

Money and success don't change people; they merely amplify what is already there.

If we want to make a statement about a man's nature on the basis of his physiognomy, we must take everything into account; it is in his distress that a man is tested, for then his nature is revealed.

I have to admit that 'Psychology Today' was one of the first magazines I started reading, back when I was 13 or 14, because I was the kind of kid that was curious about the mysterious human mind - I hoped to learn about telekenisis, multiple personalities, psychosis, and various other cool and terrible things that happened inside people's heads.

It's hard to know exactly how people develop the characters they do. There could be people from humble beginnings that turn into jerks. Some characteristics are just part of that special soul of that human being.

While the things that motivate us differ greatly from one person to the next, the outcomes do not.

What's interesting is relative levels of introversion tend to stay the same. If you went back to your reunion from school, you would probably find that if you ranked everyone in your class into terms of levels of introversion and extroversion you'd still be the same rank.

While nobody has identified any gene for religion, there are certainly some candidate genes that may influence human personality and confer a tendency to religious feelings. Some of the genes likely to be involved are those which control levels of different chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain.

Brains, you see, vary a lot from person to person - they vary as much as faces do.

Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart.

If you have sense enough to realize why flies gather around a restaurant, you should be able to appreciate why men run for office.

It's interesting: I think, genetically, there are people who need different things, like exercise. I need the exercise, others not so much, and I think more and more, we'll start to understand why people's bodies function in certain ways.