Quotes from Steven Pinker

A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as bycatch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets. Incarceration

Algunos experimentos han demostrado que a las personas les convence más un discurso político cuando el orador apela a su corazón y su mente con metáforas relacionadas con la familia.

The first is the decline of communism (together with intrusive socialism). For reasons we have seen, market economies can generate wealth prodigiously while totalitarian planned economies impose scarcity, stagnation, and often famine.

We judge people not just on what they do but on what they are - not just on whether someone has given more than he has taken, but on whether he is the kind of person who would sell you down the river or knife you in the back if it were ever in his interests to do so.

The inventor of the highway guard rail did not get a Nobel Prize, nor are humanitarian awards given to designers of clearer prescription drug labels.

one should not confuse clarity with condescension.

Market economies, in addition to reaping the benefits of specialization and providing incentives for people to produce things that other people want, solve the problem of coordinating the efforts of hundreds of millions of people by using prices to propagate information about need and availability far and wide, a computational problem that no planner is brilliant enough to solve from a central bureau.

The romantic notion that all evil is a product of society has justified the release of dangerous psychopaths who promptly murdered innocent people. And the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history.

From their position of weakness, Harari notes, what terrorists seek to accomplish is not damage but theater.

A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems, holding geography, history, and culture constant.

Burr would not be the last vice president to shoot a man, but he was a better shot than Dick Cheney,..

As the most famous product of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, put it, in order to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

We have been spiritually impoverished, they say, by the rise of individualism, materialism, consumerism, and decadent wealth, and by the erosion of traditional communities with their hearty social bonds and their sense of meaning and purpose bestowed by religion.

A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word "democratic" in its official name, like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn't one.

While a vision of world peace may have given John and Yoko some good songs, it is hopelessly naïve in the real world.

Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history's major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers

Poverty has no causes," wrote the economist Peter Bauer. "Wealth has causes.

Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they're less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people's lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore. Public opinion researchers call it the Optimism Gap.

Established democracies are relatively safe places, as are established autocracies, but emerging democracies and semi-democracies (also called anocracies) are often plagued by violent crime and vulnerable to civil war, which sometimes shade into each other.

When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the future of forecasting, he said, "When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials."49

In The Blank Slate I argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature—the doctrine of the Noble Savage—was a reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley

As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer.

There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical.