Steven Pinker Quotes

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

The description is not the described.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

Everyone has to understand what we're saying to one another and there's no point in me thinking the line means this and the person I'm speaking to thinks it means something else. So there's a certain amount of analyzing of text that's of course necessary.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.