Steven Pinker Quotes

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

Man is a child of his environment.

In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

We're all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us.

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

It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.

Different people bring out different aspects of ones personality.

How we behave in our public lives inevitably reflects values, attitudes and experiences embedded in our private lives and vice versa.

The primary problem in the psychology of becoming is to account for the transformation by which the unsocialized infant becomes an adult with structured loves, hates, loyalties, and interests, capable of taking his place in a complexly ordered society.

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.

Behavior is mutable. It changes from place to place. It's like accents, dialect - it varies from one area to another. But there are universal truths about what it means to be a human being. All the other stuff is like applique. Learning that was interesting to me and probably useful for becoming an actor.

The functions of the family in a highly differentiated society are not to be interpreted as functions directly on behalf of the society, but on behalf of personality.

You'll always end up filling out a character. It might be with aspects of yourself.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

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

Society becomes how we behave.

We do become our conversations. We really will become our associations.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

Humans, the supremely social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb, for good or ill, the influences that surround us.