Steven Pinker Quotes

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

What's done to children, they will do to society.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

Human beings are made up of many different values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.

Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.

What we call 'evil' doesn't necessarily deserve any kind of respect or understanding, by any means; it just deserves an acknowledgement of its complexity so we can better understand it - so we can help prevent it.

There will always be people treated badly, which I feel is basic human nature and difficult to eliminate.

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority

Most people when they come after you for advice come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected.

One of the things that is so important, critical I think, in reading not just the founders but thousands of years as you put it, that discussion about corruption, is that you can't talk about the problem of corruption without talking about human nature.

I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.

I'm trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.

I am not a political writer. I agree with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, who are social writers. I can't write in that fashion. I am not good enough for that. What I am interested in is family dramas and why we are doing bad things to each other and what our motives are.

If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.

Man's indecency to man all over the world rules out the idea of humanity as an actuality. It is a dream of young idealists. In practice a misnomer

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.

A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.

In one sense, the Stanford prison study is more like a Greek drama than a traditional experiment, in that we have humanity, represented by a bunch of good people, pitted against an evil-producing situation. The question is, does the goodness of the people overwhelm the bad situation, or does the bad situation overwhelm the good people?

Cruelty is like hope: it springs eternal.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

I think that as human beings, we quite naturally take for granted what is similar among human beings and, then, pay attention to what differentiates us. That makes perfect sense for us as human beings.