Steven Pinker Quotes

Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.

We do not respect people's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

I will live by the standard of reason, and if thinking in accordance with reason takes me to perdition, then I will go to hell with my reason rather than to heaven without it.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.

True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.

To disparage the dictate of reason is equivalent to contemning the command of God.

When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.

If one doesn't value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

I just happen to believe that people are not stupid.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

Because we [people] have an intellect, part of what we do is try to understand the "intelligent design." Everything we don't know is "intelligent design." Everything we do know is science.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

A true conservative is on the side of science.

An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).

I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It's like the way you'd follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.

Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up.

There are lots of people who cannot think seriously without injuring their minds.

My position is that we should not succumb to irrational belief.

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

So this is my attempt to give a preliminary - probably far too crude - account of how philosophy by showing can really teach us. The attempts we make to work through problems by reasoning always presuppose starting points, and even the most self-critical philosophers adopt some of those starting points simply by picking them up from the social environments in which they grow up.