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Human selfishness being what it is, almost everyone kept the pleasant task for themselves. -- Steven Pinker
The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights. This -- Steven Pinker
They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being. -- Steven Pinker
Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy. -- Steven Pinker
Beelzebug n. Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out. -- Steven Pinker
Whatever the pedagogical merits may be of feeding children misinformation, it is inappropriate for adults. There is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with a coordinator. -- Steven Pinker
Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship. -- Steven Pinker
I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet -- Steven Pinker
The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. -- Steven Pinker
I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor. -- Steven Pinker
Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians. -- Steven Pinker
I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science. -- Steven Pinker
If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time. -- Steven Pinker
Furbling v. Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank even when you're the only person in line. -- Steven Pinker
As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, "Life was better since the government came" because "a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot. -- Steven Pinker
A comparative adjective is appropriate when the two items are being directly contrasted, one against the other; a superlative can work when an item is superior not just to the alternative in view at the time but to a larger implicit comparison group. -- Steven Pinker
States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one. -- Steven Pinker
In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth. -- Steven Pinker
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. -- Steven Pinker
The similarity between space and time is limpid enough that we routinely use space to represent time in calendars, hourglasses, and other time-keeping devices. And the cognitive similarity also shows up in everyday metaphors where spatial terms are borrowed to refer to time. -- Steven Pinker
We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from "I think I understand" to "I understand," we need to see the sights and feel the motions. -- Steven Pinker
A ... reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not. -- Steven Pinker
The major distinction between the indefinite article, a, and the definite article, the.6 When a character makes his first appearance on stage, he is introduced with a. When we are subsequently told about him, we already know who he is, and he is mentioned with the: -- Steven Pinker
Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe. -- Steven Pinker
There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal. -- Steven Pinker
An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton's world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein's. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events. -- Steven Pinker
Saying something to your child and then realizing that you sound like one of your own parents: deja vieux, mamamorphosis, mnemomic, patterfamilias, vox pop, nagativism, parentriloquism. -- Steven Pinker
The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you're pretending to communicate. -- Steven Pinker
A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as bycatch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets. Incarceration -- Steven Pinker
Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war. -- Steven Pinker
Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is. -- Steven Pinker
I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing. -- Steven Pinker
As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide. -- Steven Pinker
Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it. (Eventually the rules were rewritten so that players were "liberating" rather than conquering their opponents' territories.) -- Steven Pinker
Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war. -- Steven Pinker
It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate. -- Steven Pinker
Should we add the 40 to 50 million victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic to the 15 million who were killed in World War I, because the flu virus would not have evolved its virulence if the war hadn't packed so many troops into trenches? -- Steven Pinker
As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal. -- Steven Pinker
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen. -- Steven Pinker
The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution. -- Steven Pinker
Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented. -- Steven Pinker
Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism. -- Steven Pinker
One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor. -- Steven Pinker
The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols. -- Steven Pinker
The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. -- Steven Pinker
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs. -- Steven Pinker
All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers. -- Steven Pinker
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on. -- Steven Pinker
We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute. -- Steven Pinker
Between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68 -- Steven Pinker
Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek - why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish. -- Steven Pinker
Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. -- Steven Pinker
When they held constant all the factors that typically push men into marriage, they found that actually getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter.107 The causal pathway has been pithily explained by Johnny Cash: Because you're mine, I walk the line. -- Steven Pinker
The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun. -- Steven Pinker
The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate ... is a totalitarian's dream. -- Steven Pinker
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. -- Steven Pinker
Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies. -- Steven Pinker
The zero-sum nature of the medieval economy was reinforced by a Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources. -- Steven Pinker
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.2 -- Steven Pinker
According to Howard, "this dialectic between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, between the individual and the tribe, was to pervade, and to a large extent shape, the history of Europe throughout the nineteenth century, and of the world the century after that."109 -- Steven Pinker
As people ages, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline - the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it -- Steven Pinker
Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators. -- Steven Pinker
Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them. -- Steven Pinker
Concocting a statement that you have trouble believing in the first place (such as "A herring is a mammal"), and then negating it, requires two bouts of cognitive heavy lifting rather than one. -- Steven Pinker
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other. -- Steven Pinker
The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize litterers) as by the signaling of a social norm: This is the kind of place where people obey the rules. -- Steven Pinker
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years. -- Steven Pinker
Syntax is complex, but the complexity is there for a reason. For our thoughts are surely even more complex, and we are limited by a mouth that can pronounce a single word at a time. -- Steven Pinker
Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject. -- Steven Pinker
It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics. -- Steven Pinker
Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it. -- Steven Pinker
The imprecision in the way languages express time is related to the imprecision in the way we experience and remember it. Though no one experiences time as coarsely as the handful of distinctions in a tense system would suggest, we don't live by a mental stopwatch either. -- Steven Pinker
America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself. -- Steven Pinker
Why spend money and blood to invade a country and plunder its treasure when you can just buy it from them at less expense and sell them some of your own? -- Steven Pinker
This cognitive illusion was first noted in 1968 by the mathematician William Feller in his classic textbook on probability: "To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster."33 Here are a few examples of the cluster illusion. The -- Steven Pinker
Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster, -- Steven Pinker
The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it's fine. -- Steven Pinker
No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves. -- Steven Pinker
So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents. -- Steven Pinker
A linguistically informed literary criticism is the key to resolving conflict and frustration, from psychotherapy and law to philosophy and politics. Call this the messianic theory. It is based on the idea that TO THINK IS TO GRASP A METAPHOR-the metaphor metaphor. -- Steven Pinker
It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation). -- Steven Pinker
Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with. -- Steven Pinker
We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. -- Steven Pinker
Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent. -- Steven Pinker
Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons -- Steven Pinker
The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves? -- Steven Pinker
Any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism." A -- Steven Pinker
It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. -- Steven Pinker
It begins with skepticism.147 The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. -- Steven Pinker
The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. -- Steven Pinker
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can. -- Steven Pinker
We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision. -- Steven Pinker
Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare. -- Steven Pinker
Some of the most rewarding scientific pursuits begin with the discovery of a paradox. Nature does not go out of its way to befuddle us, and if some phenomenon seems to make no sense no matter how we look at it, we are probably in ignorance of deep and far-ranging principles. -- Steven Pinker
Abstract ideas are connected in a systematic way to more concrete experiences. -- Steven Pinker
empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. -- Steven Pinker
Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible's approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own. -- Steven Pinker
I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something. -- Steven Pinker
No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. -- Steven Pinker
Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday. -- Steven Pinker
Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point. -- Steven Pinker
Clones, in fact, are just identical twins born at different times. -- Steven Pinker
According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence. -- Steven Pinker
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. -- Steven Pinker
We can remind ourselves of the reasons to strive for good style: to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world. -- Steven Pinker
Effective education may also require co-opting old faculties to deal with new demands ... Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. -- Steven Pinker
We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way. -- Steven Pinker
A woman gets into a taxi in Boston's Logan airport and asks the driver, 'Can you take me somplace where I can get scrod?' He says, 'Gee, that's the first time I've heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive. -- Steven Pinker
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false. -- Steven Pinker
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view. -- Steven Pinker
The final word on the political non-implications of group differences must go to Gloria Steinem: There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone. -- Steven Pinker
I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives. -- Steven Pinker
Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business. -- Steven Pinker
The American punctuation rule sticks in the craw of every computer scientist, logician, and linguist, because any ordering of typographical delimiters that fails to reflect the logical nesting of the content makes a shambles of their work. -- Steven Pinker
Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. -- Steven Pinker
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance. -- Steven Pinker
Mitigate and credible and credulous. What this means -- Steven Pinker
The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. -- Steven Pinker
You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs. -- Steven Pinker
Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold business people in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy. -- Steven Pinker
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. -- Steven Pinker
Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. -- Steven Pinker
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. -- Steven Pinker
As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline - the illusion of the good old days. -- Steven Pinker
Laplace's Demon, the hypothetical imp that knows the instantaneous positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, was said to be able to calculate the entire future or past by plugging these values into the equations that express the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism. -- Steven Pinker
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation. -- Steven Pinker
One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land. -- Steven Pinker
Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful. They simulate a conversation, as classic style recommends, and they are gifts to the memory-challenged reader. -- Steven Pinker
Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know. -- Steven Pinker
The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. -- Steven Pinker
Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. -- Steven Pinker
A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence. -- Steven Pinker
The dicey moment when you should introduce two people but can't remember one of their names; whomnesia, persona non data, nomenclutchure, notworking, mumbleduction, introducking -- Steven Pinker
Peppier n. The waiter at a fancy restaurant whose sole purpose seems to be walking around asking diners if they want ground pepper. -- Steven Pinker
I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game. -- Steven Pinker
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. -- Steven Pinker
In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times! -- Steven Pinker
The real principle is that between is used for a relationship of an individual to any number of other individuals, as long as they are being considered two at a time, whereas among is used for a relationship of an individual to an amorphous mass or collectivity. -- Steven Pinker
Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties. -- Steven Pinker
Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows. -- Steven Pinker
My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance. -- Steven Pinker
The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them, -- Steven Pinker
It's not just that there are two sides to every dispute. It's that each side sincerely believes its version of the story, namely that it is an innocent and long-suffering victim and the other side a malevolent and treacherous sadist. -- Steven Pinker
Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes. -- Steven Pinker
Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. -- Steven Pinker
World's most widely read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min, and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. -- Steven Pinker
Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time. -- Steven Pinker
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? -- Steven Pinker
Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on. -- Steven Pinker
Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around them. -- Steven Pinker
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis. -- Steven Pinker
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu. -- Steven Pinker
A reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it. -- Steven Pinker
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life. -- Steven Pinker
It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. -- Steven Pinker
The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt ... ," but "If ... then ... else. -- Steven Pinker
Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy. -- Steven Pinker
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified. -- Steven Pinker
Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. -- Steven Pinker
In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago, who approved, carried out, and even savored the infliction of unspeakable agony on other living beings. What were these people feeling? And why don't we feel it today? -- Steven Pinker
Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players. -- Steven Pinker
Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news. -- Steven Pinker
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? -- Steven Pinker
An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate. -- Steven Pinker
Man has no nature; what he has is history. -- Steven Pinker
Unlike features of a landscape like trees and mountains, people have feet. They move to places where opportunities are best, and they soon invite their friends and relatives to join them. -- Steven Pinker
Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an "ape legacy" that humans are doomed to live by. -- Steven Pinker
The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution. -- Steven Pinker
Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn. -- Steven Pinker
If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them. -- Steven Pinker
I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. -- Steven Pinker
I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift. -- Steven Pinker
The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don't they imitate their parents' habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?), -- Steven Pinker
By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined "despotism" down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers. At -- Steven Pinker
The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38 -- Steven Pinker
Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young. -- Steven Pinker
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. -- Steven Pinker
Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer. -- Steven Pinker
From the 17th to the 19th century, a cult in India strangled tens of thousands of travelers as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali. -- Steven Pinker
Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. -- Steven Pinker
If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate. -- Steven Pinker
One doesn't have to invoke dominance to explain why Genghis Khan inseminated so many women that his Y chromosome is common in Central Asia today; it's enough to observe that he killed the women's fathers and husbands. -- Steven Pinker
Today 8 percent of the men who live within the former territory of the Mongol Empire share a Y chromosome that dates to around the time of Genghis, most likely because they descended from him and -- Steven Pinker
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. -- Steven Pinker
With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution. -- Steven Pinker
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. -- Steven Pinker
Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. -- Steven Pinker
Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. -- Steven Pinker
The English language is a rich verbal tapestry woven together from the tongues of the Greeks, the Latins, the Angles, the Klaxtons, the Celtics, and many more other ancient peoples, all of whom had severe drinking problems." Let -- Steven Pinker
Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing. -- Steven Pinker
When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering. -- Steven Pinker
What is true for the emotions may also be true for the intellect. Some of our perplexities may come from a mismatch between the purposes for which our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today. -- Steven Pinker
( ... ) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth. -- Steven Pinker
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the grounds of our personal lot.62 -- Steven Pinker
The word 'glamour' comes from the word 'grammar', and since the Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules? -- Steven Pinker
In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires. -- Steven Pinker
Although 'to paint' means something like "to cause to be covered with paint," one does not 'paint a brush' when one dips it in the can, and it is hard to say with a straight face that "Michelangelo painted the ceiling" when he caused the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be covered with paint. -- Steven Pinker
Of this, to repeat, means that nuclear terrorism is impossible, only that it is not, as so many people insist, imminent, inevitable, or highly probable. -- Steven Pinker
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of ... our mental faculties. -- Steven Pinker
Horses have an even number of legs. Behind they have two legs, and in front they have fore-legs. This makes six legs, which is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse. But the only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, horses have an infinite number of legs. -- Steven Pinker
There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success. -- Steven Pinker
Sconser n. A person who looks around while talking to you to see if there's anyone more interesting about. -- Steven Pinker
We learn that CONTROL IS UP because we experience fights in which the victor ends up on top, that GOALS ARE DESTINATIONS because we walk toward something we want, and that TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT because things that approach us get closer and closer as time elapses. -- Steven Pinker
Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today's Republican party, just as the two Georges - the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern - found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972. -- Steven Pinker
And rivaling the Democratic Peace theory as a categorical factoid about modern conflict prevention is the Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war. The only unambiguous Big Mac Attack took place in 1999, when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.234 -- Steven Pinker
Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless -- Steven Pinker
Societies that empower women are less violent in every way. -- Steven Pinker
The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values. -- Steven Pinker
Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth. -- Steven Pinker
It's really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym. -- Steven Pinker
The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance. -- Steven Pinker
discriminate between the -- Steven Pinker
Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand. -- Steven Pinker
The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd. -- Steven Pinker
Trend-setters are members of upper classes who adopt the styles of lower classes to differentiate themselves from middle classes, who wouldn't be caught dead in lower-class styles because they're the ones in danger of being mistaken for them. -- Steven Pinker
Capitalism saved the world, and there is even a heretical theory now, moving up from the level of individuals to countries: countries that trade more and have more open economies are less likely to fight wars and less likely to have genocides. -- Steven Pinker
The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound. -- Steven Pinker
PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect. -- Steven Pinker
In support of the idea that moral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. 3 -- Steven Pinker
Julius Caesar was one of the thirty-four Roman emperors (out of the total of forty-nine that reigned until the division of the empire) who were killed by guards, high officials, or members of their own families. -- Steven Pinker
Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas. -- Steven Pinker
Today the campaign for world government lives on mainly among kooks and science fiction fans. -- Steven Pinker
In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all. -- Steven Pinker
As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully. -- Steven Pinker
Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different. -- Steven Pinker
The inability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names. -- Steven Pinker
meinstein n. My son, the genius. -- Steven Pinker
One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire. -- Steven Pinker
Forty years ago two-thirds of children walked or biked to school; today 10 percent do. A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209 -- Steven Pinker
My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test. -- Steven Pinker
To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And -- Steven Pinker
Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't. -- Steven Pinker
Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles. -- Steven Pinker
Behavioral genetics confirms that aggressive tendencies can be inherited, and that gives natural selection material to work with in shifting the average violent tendencies of a population. -- Steven Pinker
Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics. -- Steven Pinker
There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?' -- Steven Pinker
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high. -- Steven Pinker
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world. -- Steven Pinker
an exception: in the sentence I asked him what he thought of my review in his book, and his response was unprintable, the word unprintable means something much more specific than "incapable of being printed.") The -- Steven Pinker
In the earlier centuries the upper and lower social classes engaged in homicide at comparable rates. But as the homicide rate fell, it dropped far more precipitously among the upper classes than among the lower ones, an important social change -- Steven Pinker
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men. -- Steven Pinker
The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls. -- Steven Pinker
The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship. -- Steven Pinker
Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface. -- Steven Pinker
Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries. -- Steven Pinker
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - wholeheartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. -- Steven Pinker
Roads, better harnesses for horses, time-keeping devices, financial instruments like a currency that was recognized everywhere in the kingdom, enforceable contracts - all of this made commerce more appealing than plunder. -- Steven Pinker
Though it isn't obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney , the tales are filled with murder,infanticide,cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse - grimm fairy tales indeed. -- Steven Pinker
Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene. -- Steven Pinker
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change. -- Steven Pinker
Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader's attention and memory. -- Steven Pinker
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. -- Steven Pinker
Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick. -- Steven Pinker
Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction. -- Steven Pinker
Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images, -- Steven Pinker
I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net. -- Steven Pinker
The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain. -- Steven Pinker
Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe. -- Steven Pinker
I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment. -- Steven Pinker
My laptop has freed me to travel. -- Steven Pinker
There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities. -- Steven Pinker
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. -- Steven Pinker
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time. -- Steven Pinker
As we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of. -- Steven Pinker
The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living. -- Steven Pinker
The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211 -- Steven Pinker
As they say, everybody wins. Of course, an exchange at a single moment in time only pays when there is a division of labor. -- Steven Pinker
People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others. -- Steven Pinker
Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business. -- Steven Pinker
As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores. -- Steven Pinker
Experiments that measure readers' comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot. -- Steven Pinker
I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew. -- Steven Pinker
I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs. -- Steven Pinker
I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses. -- Steven Pinker
What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened. -- Steven Pinker
Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, "natural" in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don't want it. -- Steven Pinker
Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language. -- Steven Pinker
If a person did all the work of a slave but had the option of quitting at any time without being physically restrained or punished, we would not call him a slave - and this violence was often a regular part of a slave's life. -- Steven Pinker
Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal. -- Steven Pinker
Why is it surprising that scientists might have long hair and wear cowboy boots? In fields like neuroscience, where the events you are recording are so minute, I suspect scientists cultivate a boring, reliable image. A scientist with a reputation for flamboyance might be suspect. -- Steven Pinker
boor (which originally just meant "farmer," as in the German Bauer and Dutch boer); villain (from the French vilein, a serf or villager); churlish (from English churl, a commoner); vulgar (common, as in the term vulgate); and ignoble, not an aristocrat. -- Steven Pinker
People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary's malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife. -- Steven Pinker
So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war. -- Steven Pinker
we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time. -- Steven Pinker
The starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader. -- Steven Pinker
The momentary confusion experienced by everyone in the vicinity when a cell phone rings and no one is sure if it is his/hers or not: conphonesion, phonundrum, ringchronicity, ringxiety, fauxcellarm, pandephonium. -- Steven Pinker
The realization of the perfect riposte three hours after the argument: hindser, stairwit, retrotort, afterism. -- Steven Pinker
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer. -- Steven Pinker
All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news. -- Steven Pinker
Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading. -- Steven Pinker
Together with the topic of a text, the reader usually needs to know its point. He needs to know what the author is trying to accomplish as she explores the topic. -- Steven Pinker
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. -- Steven Pinker
An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks. -- Steven Pinker
An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets. -- Steven Pinker
There is a joke about a commuter who's on his way to work when he gets a call on his mobile phone from his wife. "Be careful, honey," she says. "They just said on the radio that there's a maniac driving on the wrong side of the freeway." "One maniac?" he replies; "There are thousands of them! -- Steven Pinker
sarchasm n. The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. -- Steven Pinker
Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift -- Steven Pinker
The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself. -- Steven Pinker
The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit. -- Steven Pinker
the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond. Speech -- Steven Pinker
Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. -- Steven Pinker
According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young. -- Steven Pinker
As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too. -- Steven Pinker
Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on. -- Steven Pinker
Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. -- Steven Pinker
People take even greater umbrage when they hear themselves labeled with a common noun. The reason is that a noun predicate appears to pigeonhole the with a stereotype of a category rather than referring to them as an individual who happens to possess a trait. -- Steven Pinker
As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another. -- Steven Pinker
The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe. -- Steven Pinker
Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not. -- Steven Pinker
The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned. -- Steven Pinker
No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn. -- Steven Pinker
The most common motives for homicide are moralistic: retaliation after an insult, escalation of a domestic quarrel, punishing an unfaithful or deserting romantic partner, and other acts of jealousy, revenge, and self-defense. -- Steven Pinker
People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections. -- Steven Pinker
We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing -- Steven Pinker
When a grammatical construction is associated with politicians you can be sure that it provides a way to evade responsibility. Zombie nouns, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That -- Steven Pinker
Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have gantlets of improbabilities. -- Steven Pinker
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology. -- Steven Pinker
Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived. -- Steven Pinker
As we saw in chapter 3, one way the early modern Europeans used Odyssean self-control was to keep sharp knives out of reach at the dinner table. -- Steven Pinker
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. -- Steven Pinker
The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220) -- Steven Pinker
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. -- Steven Pinker
Surveys of personal values in men and women find that the men assign a lopsided value to professional status compared to all the other pleasures of life.108 -- Steven Pinker
For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.' -- Steven Pinker
I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated. -- Steven Pinker
The Moralization Gap consists of complementary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victim and a perpetrator. -- Steven Pinker
For these reasons, oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle hormone. The reuse of the hormone in so many forms of human closeness supports a suggestion by Batson that maternal care is the evolutionary precursor of other forms of human sympathy. -- Steven Pinker
Hextable n. The record you find in someone else's collection which instantly tells you you could never go out with them. -- Steven Pinker
Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose. -- Steven Pinker
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. -- Steven Pinker
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind. -- Steven Pinker
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. -- Steven Pinker
Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. -- Steven Pinker
Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement. -- Steven Pinker
One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected. -- Steven Pinker
If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable. -- Steven Pinker
I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated. -- Steven Pinker
The conscious mind - the self or soul - is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. -- Steven Pinker
Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world. -- Steven Pinker
Journalists sometimes speculate about "brain transplants" when they really should be calling them "body transplants," because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient. -- Steven Pinker
[I]n the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong. -- Steven Pinker
I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools. -- Steven Pinker
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous. -- Steven Pinker
The Moralization Gap is part of a larger phenomenon called self-serving biases. People try to look good. "Good" can mean effective, potent, desirable, and competent, or it can mean virtuous, honest, generous, and altruistic. -- Steven Pinker
Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc. -- Steven Pinker
Working out what it would take to program goodness into a robot shows not only how much machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with. -- Steven Pinker
Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it's a more inviting one. -- Steven Pinker
The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. -- Steven Pinker
At every moment we choose, consciously or unconsciously, between good things now and better things later. -- Steven Pinker
There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. -- Steven Pinker
Careful writers and discerning readers delight in the profusion of words in the English lexicon, no two of which are exact synonyms. Many words convey subtle shades of meaning, -- Steven Pinker
When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy. -- Steven Pinker
The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. -- Steven Pinker
You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself. -- Steven Pinker
According to studies of writing quality, a varied vocabulary and the use of unusual words are two of the features that distinguish sprightly prose from mush. -- Steven Pinker
Creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose -- Steven Pinker
Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't. -- Steven Pinker
A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature. -- Steven Pinker
In the West today public places are no longer named after military victories. Our war memorials depict not proud commanders on horseback but weeping mothers, weary soldiers, or exhaustive lists of names of the dead. -- Steven Pinker
So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species. -- Steven Pinker
You don't like to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin of life or the fate of the planet? -- Steven Pinker
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable? -- Steven Pinker
The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know. -- Steven Pinker
The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor. -- Steven Pinker
For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on. -- Steven Pinker
If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important. -- Steven Pinker
[ ... ] nonstate conflicts kill far fewer people than conflicts that involve a government, perhaps a quarter as many. Again, this is not surprising, since goverments almost by definition are in the violence business. -- Steven Pinker
In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response. -- Steven Pinker
The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head. -- Steven Pinker
What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status. Now -- Steven Pinker
You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. -- Steven Pinker
Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights. -- Steven Pinker
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. -- Steven Pinker
So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold. -- Steven Pinker
The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood. -- Steven Pinker
A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts. -- Steven Pinker
If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success. -- Steven Pinker
However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution. -- Steven Pinker
This is the kind of writer who gets the ball rolling in his search for the holy grail, but finds that it's neither magic bullet nor a slam dunk, so he rolls with the punches and lets the chips fall where they may while seeing the glass as half-full, which is easier said than done. -- Steven Pinker
Legal investigation. As Clinton noted, My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful. -- Steven Pinker
One [dogma] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators. -- Steven Pinker
You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again. -- Steven Pinker
An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny. -- Steven Pinker
In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods. -- Steven Pinker
the political scientist James Payne suggests that ancient peoples put a low value on other people's lives because pain and death were so common in their own. This set a low threshold for any practice that had a chance of bringing them an advantage, even if the price was the lives of others. -- Steven Pinker
Charles Kenny's Getting Better.17 -- Steven Pinker
The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat. -- Steven Pinker
The alternative to the myth of pure evil is that most of the harm that people visit on one another comes from motives that are found in every normal person. -- Steven Pinker
Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth. -- Steven Pinker
Journalists assigned to an issue often cover the coverage, creating the notorious media echo chamber. -- Steven Pinker
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. -- Steven Pinker
The [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind. -- Steven Pinker
Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act. -- Steven Pinker
The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader's freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship. -- Steven Pinker
I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest. -- Steven Pinker
events that occur at random will seem to come in clusters, because it would take a nonrandom process to space them out. -- Steven Pinker
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. -- Steven Pinker
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. -- Steven Pinker
In either case genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents or society. -- Steven Pinker
Behavioral science is not for sissies. -- Steven Pinker
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. -- Steven Pinker
People in a connected world are exposed to the stories of strangers through many channels, including face-to-face encounters, interviews in the media, and memoirs and autobiographical accounts. -- Steven Pinker
And every word has at most one inflectional suffix. We never get opensed or opensing, nor do the plural -s and possessive s stack up when several owners own something: the dogs' blanket, not the dogs's (dogzez) blanket. Finally, -- Steven Pinker
'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war. -- Steven Pinker
If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think. -- Steven Pinker
[Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies. -- Steven Pinker
M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say. -- Steven Pinker
Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r) -- Steven Pinker
The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate. -- Steven Pinker
For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. -- Steven Pinker
Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend. -- Steven Pinker
The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history. -- Steven Pinker
We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in. -- Steven Pinker
For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for? -- Steven Pinker
I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back. -- Steven Pinker
A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others. -- Steven Pinker
In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. -- Steven Pinker
A successful learner, ... must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others. -- Steven Pinker
Since that era the question "Do you have any food restrictions?" has become a part of the etiquette of a dinner invitation, and participants at conference dinners can now tick a box that will replace a plate of rubber chicken with a plate of sodden eggplant. -- Steven Pinker
Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy. -- Steven Pinker
and here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity, for they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all -- Steven Pinker
Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance. -- Steven Pinker
Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world. -- Steven Pinker
People notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning. -- Steven Pinker
A great principle of moral advancement, on par with "Love thy neighbor" and "All men are created equal," is the one on the bumper sticker: "Shit happens. -- Steven Pinker
Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works. -- Steven Pinker
These 'anthropologists of peace' (who in fact are rather aggressive academics - the ethologist Johan van der Dennen calls them the Peace and Harmony Mafia. -- Steven Pinker
But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. -- Steven Pinker
Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity. -- Steven Pinker
Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats? -- Steven Pinker
As soon as you add an intensifier, you're turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scale. -- Steven Pinker
Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related. -- Steven Pinker
They write as if they have something important to show. -- Steven Pinker
The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. -- Steven Pinker
By today's sensibilities, it's more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution. -- Steven Pinker
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. -- Steven Pinker
Once you start rummaging around in the realm of the unverifiable there is considerable room for creativity, and accusations of sorcery are often blended with self-serving motives. Tribal people, anthropologists have shown, often single out despised in-laws for allegations of witchcraft, a convenient -- Steven Pinker
The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to. -- Steven Pinker
If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied. -- Steven Pinker
Does it never strike you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand? -- Steven Pinker
In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them. -- Steven Pinker
Often people have an instant intuition that an action is immoral, and then struggle, often unsuccessfully, to come up with reasons why it is immoral.169 -- Steven Pinker
Smarter people tend to think more like economists -- Steven Pinker
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks. -- Steven Pinker
When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum. -- Steven Pinker
Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all. -- Steven Pinker
discriminate between the principles that improve the quality of prose and the superstitions, fetishes, shibboleths, and initiation ordeals that have been passed down in the traditions of usage. The -- Steven Pinker
The problem with thoughtless signposting is that the reader has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to, -- Steven Pinker
Nor is mathematics about a Platonic reality of eternal truths. It is a creation of the human body and senses, growing out of the activities of moving along a path and of collecting, constructing, and measuring objects. -- Steven Pinker
Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings. -- Steven Pinker
My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries. -- Steven Pinker
Sympathy, recall, tends to be expressed in communal relationships, the kind that are also accompanied by guilt and forgiveness. Anything that creates a communal relationship, then, should also create sympathy. -- Steven Pinker
The errors could have been avoided by mentally moving the who or whom back into the gap and sounding out the sentence (or, if your intuitions about who and whom are squishy, inserting he or him in the gap instead). -- Steven Pinker
The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth. -- Steven Pinker
Reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. -- Steven Pinker
Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution -- Steven Pinker
Controversies remain over the details, but today no biologist doubts that evolutionary dynamics like mutualism, kinship, and various forms of reciprocity can select for psychological faculties that, under the right circumstances, can lead people to coexist peacefully.4 -- Steven Pinker
Disgust is intuitive microbiology -- Steven Pinker
The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise. -- Steven Pinker
Political ideologies, too, cannot be defined in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor that SOCIETY IS A FAMILY. The political right likens society to a family commanded by a strict father, the political left to a family cared for by a nurturant parent. -- Steven Pinker
Fiction is empathy technology. -- Steven Pinker
As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister. -- Steven Pinker
I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. -- Steven Pinker
People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like. -- Steven Pinker
The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly: (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword. -- Steven Pinker
Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. -- Steven Pinker
The world has far too much morality. -- Steven Pinker
20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. -- Steven Pinker
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself. -- Steven Pinker
Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. -- Steven Pinker
I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works. -- Steven Pinker
We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them. -- Steven Pinker
the mind is a neural computer -- Steven Pinker
endless loop, n. See loop, endless.
loop, endless, n,. See endless loop. -- Steven Pinker
And in any case one should not confuse clarity with condescension. -- Steven Pinker
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. -- Steven Pinker
It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind. -- Steven Pinker
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. -- Steven Pinker
The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn't happen to them. -- Steven Pinker
Personality and socialization aren't the same thing. -- Steven Pinker
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture. -- Steven Pinker
Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce. -- Steven Pinker
Shoeburyness n. The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from someone else's bottom. -- Steven Pinker
We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two. -- Steven Pinker
In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons. -- Steven Pinker
A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication; it can lead to better reasoning. -- Steven Pinker
We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade. -- Steven Pinker
By all measures men are the more violent gender. -- Steven Pinker
