Quotes from Steven Pinker

One of the most impressive civilizing offensives of the 1990s came from African American communities, who set themselves the task of recivilizing their young men. As with the pacifying of the American West a century before, much of the moral energy came from women and the church.

Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013," Norberg writes. "After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.

Trump proposed to relax libel laws against journalists, encouraged violence against his critics at his rallies, would not commit to respecting the outcome of the 2016 election if it went against him, tried to discredit the popular vote count that did go against him, threatened to imprison his opponent in the election, and attacked the legitimacy of the judicial system when it challenged his decisions—all hallmarks of a dictator

Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.

And according to a joke that was told many times in 1993, Bill and Hillary Clinton were being driven through her hometown when Hillary spotted an old boyfriend pumping gas. If you hadn' married me, said Bill, you'd be the wife of a gas station attendant. If I hadn't married you, replied Hillary, he would be president.

The first is that we (and the hypothetical child we have been imagining) have framed the rule too broadly.

Graphs like figure 5-2 display a triumph of human well-being whose magnitude the mind cannot begin to comprehend.

Steven Alm, a judge who devised a "probation with enforcement" program, summed up the reason for the program's success: "When the system isn't consistent and predictable, when people are punished randomly, they think, My probation officer doesn't like me, or, Someone's prejudiced against me, rather than seeing that everyone who breaks a rule is treated equally, in precisely the same way.

And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

Yes, well into the 19th century, in Sweden, one of the world's wealthiest countries, between a quarter and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday, and in some years the death toll was close to half.

In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms –which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear.

meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self:

The similarity between space and time is limpid enough that we routinely use space to represent time in calendars, hourglasses, and other time-keeping devices. And the cognitive similarity also shows up in everyday metaphors where spatial terms are borrowed to refer to time.

Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are "explained" by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure of other sciences, in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions—the kind of theory that scientists praise as "beautiful" or

People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment

In the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, self-contained communes based on a philosophy of communal sharing sprang up throughout the United States. All of them collapsed from internal tensions, the ones guided by socialist ideology after a median of two years, the ones guided by religious ideology after a median of twenty years.

Violent crime is a solvable problem.

Although 'to paint' means something like to cause to be covered with paint, one does not 'paint a brush' when one dips it in the can, and it is hard to say with a straight face that Michelangelo painted the ceiling when he caused the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be covered with paint.

The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them

Experiments that measure readers' comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot.

Charles Napier, the British army's commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee, replied, "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."14

When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering.

The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it's fine.

Si uno ensalza la razón, entonces lo que importa es la integridad de los pensamientos, no las personalidades de los pensadores.