Quotes from Steven Pinker

Linguists call this the container-locative construction, because now it's the container that's being focused upon.

And if it goes against common sense, so much the worse for common sense. We don't allow common sense to override scientific discoveries when it comes to the ethology of other species, like spiders or fish, so why should we grant it veto power over discoveries about the ethology of human beings?

Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation.

Among Western democracies, the United States leaps out of the homicide statistics. Instead of clustering with kindred peoples like Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany, it hangs out with toughs like Albania and Uruguay, close to the median rate for the entire world.

Kahneman and Tversky conclude that people are not risk-averse across the board, though they are loss-averse: they seek risk if it may avoid a loss.29

An ideology can be dangerous for several reasons. The infinite good it promises prevents its true believers from cutting a deal. It allows any number of eggs to be broken to make the utopian omelet. And it renders opponents of the ideology infinitely evil and hence deserving of infinite punishment

These conflicts usually occur in failed states, almost by definition. A war that doesn't even bother to invite the government represents the ultimate failure of the state's monopoly on violence.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.

l'esprit de l'escalier

Linguists call this the content-locative construction, because the contents being moved are focused upon in the object of the sentence

Figure 10-1 shows that the world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline.

And tellingly, the number of libertarian paradises in the world—developed countries without substantial social spending—is zero.

The whole point of international terrorism is to shock the world with the most horrific spectacle imaginable.

And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.

That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.

It may be upsetting when someone says mean things on Twitter, but it is not the same as the slave trade or the Holocaust.

Today the campaign for world government lives on mainly among kooks and science fiction fans.

three-quarters of all the deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments, which Rummel calls the dekamegamurderers: the Soviet Union with 62 million, the People's Republic of China with 35 million, Nazi Germany with 21 million, and 1928–49 nationalist China with 10 million.

Things that can't go on forever can go on much longer than you think.

we tend to think that "we approach death by one year for every year we age, but during the twentieth century, the average person approached death by just seven months for every year they aged.

The reason to believe that many polysemous meanings are memorized, rather than stretched as the need arises, is that they are conventional—they are arbitrary practices of a language community, neither deducible nor universal.

downslopes in the curve show that at various times Algeria, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Romania, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia have pursued nuclear weapons but then thought the better of it—occasionally through the persuasion of an Israeli air strike, but more often by choice.

Avoid clichés like the plague—it's a no-brainer.