Quotes from Steven Pinker

This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

The nature of news is likely to distort people's view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.11

Leaders began to profess their love of peace and to claim that war had been forced upon them.118 As Mueller notes, "No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, 'I came, I saw, I conquered.' Gradually this was changed to 'I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.' This might be seen as progress."119

And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us.

economist Friedrich Hayek observed, "If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

There are but three groups worthy of respect," wrote Charles Baudelaire, "the priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.

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.

The shift is not toward complacency: 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.

A bit less obvious is the metaphor for human history, course, which refers to a path of running or flowing, as in the course of a river, a racecourse, and a headlong course. The metaphor is that A SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IS MOTION ALONG A PATHWAY, a special case of the TIME IS MOTION metaphor we met in the previous chapter.

Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.

Young pregnant women who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term.

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.

legal investigation. As Clinton noted, "My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful.

But after the September 11, 2001, attacks, terrorism became an obsession. Pundits and politicians turned up the rhetoric to eleven, and the word existential (generally modifying threat or crisis) had not seen as much use since the heyday of Sartre and Camus.

So if the language is our guide, the lofty declaration of abstract principles is really a story with a strange and clunky plot. Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers' view of what forced them to do the cutting.

santa-shmanta n. The explanation Jewish children get for why they celebrate Hanukkah while the rest of the neighbors celebrate Christmas.

Adam Freedman points out in his book on legalese, "What distinguishes legal boilerplate is its combination of archaic terminology and frenzied verbosity, as though it were written by a medieval scribe on crack.

Odyssean self-control [...] is more effective than the strenuous exertion of willpower, which is easily overmatched in the moment by temptation.

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.

discriminate between the

Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. Ordinarily

meinstein n. My son, the genius.

When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality—the interchangeability of perspectives—you get the core of morality.

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!