Steven Pinker Quotes
The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.
A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.
Behavioral science is not for sissies.
Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift
The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.
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.
I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.
The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.
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.
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.
We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.
Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.
A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.
Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.
The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.
legal investigation. As Clinton noted, “My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful.
The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt..., " but "If ... then ... else.
The whole point of international terrorism is to shock the world with the most horrific spectacle imaginable.
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.
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.