Steven Pinker Quotes

Improvement in social conditions will not compensate for a bad hereditary influence.

Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes.

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

I mean you got to thank your parents for giving you the right genes.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

You just are born the way that you're born.

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".

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

I do not think everyone is created equal. In fact, I know they're not. [The Constitution] means that everyone should have the same laws as everyone else. It doesn't mean that everyone's as smart or as cute or as lucky as everyone else.

I believe in free education, free healthcare. But I do not believe in equality.

I love Coney Island. I saw all different kinds of people - Russian, Italian, black, Puerto Rican, rich people in Sea Gate and in the co-ops. You'd see people in the co-ops or in the houses, and it was like, Man, I wish I could have this. I wish my mother and father could buy me this. Me being an independent thinker, I was like, I'm gonna get that.

In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.

They [leftists] want to eliminate the concept of winners and losers. They want to wipe out the fact that there are any differences, particularly outcome differences, from one person to another. The things that they seek are not possible. The things that they seek are rooted in self-loathing, misery, unhappiness, crankiness, whatever.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

My idea of society is that while we are born equal, meaning that we have a right to equal opportunity, all have not the same capacity.

We may be born equal but we're not equally talented.

You don't need to come from wealth or privilege to make a difference.

No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.

I mean, if it's worth a cover story that men and women are born different, what in the world must you believe and who got you to believe it?And I'm telling you: It's feminism and liberalism and all these things that seek to make everybody the same, to make everybody "equal," to have equal outcomes, make sure nobody's offended or humiliated, and to make sure nobody's really that much better than anybody else 'cause it isn't fair all these differences.

Superficially it's a problem if homosexuality is genetic - if the difference between people's sexual preferences is genetic - because at least a pure homosexual would be unlikely to reproduce and therefore pass on the genes. So the first question you ask is, is it actually genetic, and the answer is probably to some extent yes.

With my background and genetic makeup,buddy, you're lucky I'm as normal as I am. (Katra Agrotera)