Quotes from Steven Pinker

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.

Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.

One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire.

Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.

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. It led to the widespread belief that the only way to achieve justice was to hurry this dialectical process along, and allow the oppressed working classes to carry out their struggle against their bourgeois oppressors

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth. Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.

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.

Chris Rock observed, "This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you're committed to progress, you can't very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: gain (predatory raids), safety (preemptive raids), and reputation (retaliatory raids).

Positive-sum games also change the incentives for violence. If you're trading favors or surpluses with someone, your trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to you alive than dead.

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.

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.

The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood.

Some are products of the misconception that the benefits of democracy come from elections, whereas they depend more on having a government that is constrained in its powers, responsive to its citizens, and attentive to the results of its policies (chapter

Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt.

Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.

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. This

As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language. It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry: Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. Yes, smallpox was.

Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war.

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.

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