Quotes from Steven Pinker

When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.

It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational—more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock, more Alfred E. Neuman than John von Neumann. And, the cynics continue, what else would you expect from descendants of hunter-gatherers whose minds were selected to avoid becoming lunch for leopards?

Given the costs of information, the perfect can be the enemy of good.

a reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it.

How, then, can we understand this thing called rationality which would appear to be our birthright yet is so frequently and flagrantly flouted?

If there's a bag in your car, and a gallon of milk in the bag, there is a gallon of milk in your car. But if there's a person in your car, and a gallon of blood in a person, it would be strange to conclude that there is a gallon of blood in your car.

Together with the topic of a text, the reader usually needs to know its point. He needs to know what the author is trying to accomplish as she explores the topic.

Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.

Violence pervaded their entertainment as well. Tuchman describes two of the popular sports of the time: "Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws....

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

the major distinction between the indefinite article, a, and the definite article, the.6 When a character makes his first appearance on stage, he is introduced with a. When we are subsequently told about him, we already know who he is, and he is mentioned with the:

Covid quackery, climate denial, and conspiracy theories are symptoms of what some are calling an epistemological crisis and a post-truth era.

The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights. This

The dream at the dawn of the internet age that giving everyone a platform would birth a new Enlightenment seems cringeworthy today, now that we are living with bots, trolls, flame wars, fake news, twitter shaming mobs, and online harrasment.

So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.

By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.

Submitting all of one's beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

The flexibility of the human mind - its ability to flip frames, shift gestalts, or reconstruct events – is a wondrous talent. But it makes it difficult to predict how person will think and talk about a given situation. When I hit a wall with the stick, am I affecting the stick by moving it to the wall, or affecting the wall using the stick as an instrument?

The historian Yuval Harari notes that terrorism is the opposite of military action, which tries to damage the enemy's ability to retaliate and prevail.

Still, I did a double take when I saw the following headline in the Provincetown Banner: PLOVERS CLOSE PARKING LOT. An image flashed through my mind of little birds dragging a chain across the entrance and waving away traffic. I thought it was the silliest thing I had ever seen until I turned the page and read DOG FECES CLOSES BEACHES.

A second reason is that radical thinkers got trapped by their own moralizing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad after all.

Voltaire's Candide who asserts that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

The San engage in persistence hunting, which puts to use our three most conspicuous traits: our two-leggedness, which enables us to run efficiently; our hairlessness, which enables us to dump heat in hot climates; and our big heads, which enable us to be rational.

Stereotypes based on hostile depictions rather than on firsthand experience are bound to be inaccurate. And some stereotypes are accurate only because of self-fulfilling prophecies.