Steven Pinker Quotes

People are idiots. Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with the low SAT scores. The only difference is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot.

I'm just very careful with my words when I write. Obsessively careful. I'm the sort of person who worries about the difference between "slim" and "slender."

I believe the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.

Young people, when informed and empowered, when they realize that what they do truly makes a difference, can indeed change the world.

All depend upon the engagement of as many people as possible on all levels, from civil society to national leaders, to advocate for the kind of national and international commitments, legislation, and public/ private partnerships that can make the difference.

Some dogs act like people and some people act like dogs.

Many people with different backgrounds, cultures, languages, and creeds combine to make a nation. But that nation is greater than the sum total of the individual skills and talents of its people. Something more grows out of their unity than can be calculated by adding the assets of individual contributions. That intangible additional quantity is often due to the differences which make the texture of the nation rich. Therefore, we must never wipe out or deride the differences amongst us-for where there is no difference, there is only indifference.

Those who by form did see me and those who followed me by voice. Wrong the efforts they engaged in, those people will not see me.

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity.

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

Your mind and a computer have one thing in common: neither of them know the difference between the truth... and what you tell it.

The only people without problems are those in cemeteries. It is not what happens to us that separates failures from successes. It is how we perceive and what we do about what happens that makes the difference.

People see what they want to see when they need to.

Two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better, and the other worse, which is the greatest of differences that could possibly exist between them.

Antonin Scalia and Donald Trump both. They love the country. They do not understand people who don't. They would love that everybody else loved the country. But it's not gonna happen.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

There are all kinds of different forms of public service, but there's no form of public service that can make more difference for more people than partisan political activity.

Imagine a world in which we saw beyond the lines that divide us, and celebrated our differences, instead of hiding from them. Imagine a world in which we finally recognized that, fundamentally, we are all the same. And imagine if we allowed that new understanding to build relations between people and between nations.

When people do not ignore what they should ignore, but ignore what they should not ignore, this is known as ignorance.

The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.

Some people are good at performing in front of people like that, but I'm uncomfortable at it. I think maybe that's the difference between acting and being a performer. I don't think I'm a natural performer.

Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.

Irish is harder to pull off. I know southern people and I really like the midwest, so I can tap into that a little bit. It's easier to sound angry with southern than it is Irish. Yelling Irish you can sound like an angry Leprechaun. I think me screaming like I am going to kill you in Irish doesn't work.

There is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things.

Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people cannot tell the difference)