Quotes from Steven Pinker

A coherent text is a designed object: an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connectors that tie one proposition to the next. Like other designed objects, it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details, and maintaining a sense of harmony and balance.

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.

The basic script of an agonist tending, an antagonist reacting, played out in different combinations and outcomes, underlies the meaning of the causal constructions in most, perhaps all, of the world's languages. And in language after language, the prototypical force-dynamic scenario-an antagonist directly and intentionally causing a passive agonist to change from its intrinsic state-gets pride of place in the language's most concise causative construction.

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.

The beauty of reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason.

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.

Religions can also clash with humanism by valuing souls above lives, which is not as uplifting as it sounds. Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal, because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one's existence;

We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.

meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a reputation.

The enmeshing of polysemy with grammar is also visible in one of the ways that Americans and Britons are divided by their common language. When a product gives its name to an employer, the name is singular in the United States (The Globe is expanding its comics section) but plural in the United Kingdom (The Guardian are giving you the chance to win books).

Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable—who could be against human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that does not come naturally to the human mind.

Outrages cannot become public without media coverage.

I believe that journalists have not given enough thought to the way that media coverage can activate our cognitive biases and distort our understanding.

Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.

The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what's common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead.

The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history's saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.

A communal outrage inspires what the psychologist Roy Maumeister calls a victim narrative: a moralized allegory in which a harmful act is sanctified, the damage consecrated as irreparable and unforgivable. The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity. Picking nits about what actually happened is seen as not just irrelevant but sacrilegious or treasonous.

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now. —Barack Obama, 2016 CHAPTER 4 PROGRESSOPHOBIA

And contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.

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.1 No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.

Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Every audience is spread out along a bell curve of sophistication, and inevitably we'll bore a few at the top while baffling a few at the bottom; the only question is how many there will be of each.

These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police. Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising. A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.

Education is an admirable thing," wrote Oscar Wilde, "but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.