Quotes from 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.

At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people.9 Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

To make decisions "rationally," by some set of rules, means to base the decisions on some grounds of truth:

As we will see in chapter 20, Trump's success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.

The combination of a shorter workweek, more paid time off, and a longer retirement means that the fraction of a person's life that is taken up by work has fallen by a quarter just since 1960.

Ending extreme poverty for all people everywhere! May I live to see the day. (Not even Jesus was that optimistic: he told a supplicant, "The poor you will always have with you.")

Progress, The Progress Paradox, Infinite Progress, The Infinite Resource, The Rational Optimist, The Case for Rational Optimism, Utopia for Realists, Mass Flourishing, Abundance, The Improving State of the World, Getting Better, The End of Doom, The Moral Arc, The Big Ratchet, The Great Escape, The Great Surge, The Great Convergence.

In either case genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents or society.

People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors' conscience.

The Scientific Revolution had revealed that everyday experience is a narrow slice of a vast continuum of scales from the microscopic to the astronomical, and that our own abode is a rock orbiting a star rather than the center of creation.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.

King immediately appreciated that Gandhi's theory of nonviolent resistance was not a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in the teachings of Jesus. Instead it was a set of hardheaded tactics to prevail over an adversary by outwitting him rather than trying to annihilate him.

Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: "progress" unguided by humanism is not progress.

Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal.

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.

Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.")

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. —George Carlin

And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can flourish.

The final problem is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and so on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy.

Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary contains the following entry: Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page.

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.

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.

Though the Nones supported Clinton over Trump by a ratio of three to one, they stayed home on November 8, 2016, while the Evangelicals lined up to vote.