Quotes from Steven Pinker

reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions.

Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened

Enlightenment's motto, he proclaimed, is "Dare to understand!" and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.

one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.

You can only really understand something when you know what it is not.

A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not.

and here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity, for they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all

After all, other mammals fight to stay alive, appear to experience pleasure, and undergo pain, fear, and stress when their well-being is compromised. The great apes also share our higher pleasures of curiosity and love of kin, and our deeper aches of boredom, loneliness, and grief. Why should those interests be respected for our species but not for others?

From the 17th to the 19th century, a cult in India strangled tens of thousands of travelers as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali.

Radical Pragmatics – "words are fluid, and can mean different things in different circumstances. […] And what we draw upon in memory is not a lexicon of definitions but a network of associations among words and the kinds of events and actors they typically convey.

Though terrorists hope for the best, their small-scale violence almost never gets them what they want.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter (a.k.a. Hannibal the Cannibal) taunts his pursuer by saying, "I do wish we could chat longer, but I'm having an old friend for dinner.

The improved odds of a natural death came with another price, captured by the Roman historian Tacitus: "Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws." The Bible stories we examined in chapter 1 suggest that the first kings kept their subjects in awe with totalistic ideologies and brutal punishments.

discriminate between the principles that improve the quality of prose and the superstitions, fetishes, shibboleths, and initiation ordeals that have been passed down in the traditions of usage. The

Across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in trade.

If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread

Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

Humans construct an understanding of the world that is very different from the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them. They package their experience into objects and events. They assemble these objects and events into propositions, which they take to be characterisations of real and possible worlds. The characterisations are highly schematic: they pick out some aspects of a situation and ignore others, allowing the same situation to be construed in multiple ways.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, We don't serve colored people here. I said, That's all right. I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken."14

To claim that [natural selection at the level of competing groups] is morally superior to natural selection at the level of competing individuals would imply, in its human application, that systematic genodice is morally superior to random murder.

Most homicides, Black notes, are really instances of capital punishment, with a private citizen as the judge, jury, and executioner.

In 18th-century England this cronyism gave way to open economies in which anyone could sell anything to anyone, and their transactions were protected by the rule of law, property rights, enforceable contracts, and institutions like banks, corporations, and government agencies that run by fiduciary duties rather than personal connections.

I am a superman: hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience.

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.