Quotes from Steven Pinker

Julius Caesar was one of the thirty-four Roman emperors (out of the total of forty-nine that reigned until the division of the empire) who were killed by guards, high officials, or members of their own families.

In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.4

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention. —Henry Maine

Many cognitive neuroscientists suspect that mirror neurons may have a role in mentally representing the concept of an action, though even that is disputed. Most reject the extravagant claims that they can explain uniquely human abilities, and today virtually no one equates their activity with the emotion of sympathy.23

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

The information contained in a pattern depends on how coarsely or finely grained our view of the world is.

to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.

what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind?

There is a maddening phenomenon of social dynamics variously called pluralistic ignorance, the spiral of silence, and the Abilene paradox, after an anecdote in which a Texan family takes an unpleasant trip to Abilene one hot afternoon because each member thinks the others want to go.274 People may endorse a practice or opinion they deplore because they mistakenly think that everyone else favors it.

Figure 12-5 shows that in 1970 the chance that an airline passenger would die in a plane crash was less than five in a million; by 2015 that small risk had fallen a hundredfold.

freshmen. Even among English speakers, then, geocentric terms may be used when the terrain offers a conspicuous visual frame of reference

This uncovered a number of basic features of our thought processes: that the mind deploys a set of rival frames that can construe even the most plodding everyday event in more than one way; that a frame for thinking about a change of location in real space can be metaphorically extended to conceptualize a change of state as motion in state-space; and that when the mind conceives of an entity as being somewhere or going somewhere, it tends to melt it down to a holistic blob.

For most of the history of civilization, the practice of slavery was the rule rather than the exception.

Sympathy among kin emerges from the overlap in genetic makeup that interconnects us in the great web of life. Sympathy among everyone else emerges from the impartiality of nature: each of us may find ourselves in straits where a small mercy from another grants a big boost in our own welfare

This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance. DECIVILIZATION

If a person did all the work of a slave but had the option of quitting at any time without being physically restrained or punished, we would not call him a slave—and this violence was often a regular part of a slave's life.

the global trend, encouraged by the UN and every human rights organization, continues toward liberalization.

our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.

Hoy se reconoce casi universalmente que el marxismo fue un experimento que fracasó, al menos en sus aplicaciones mundanas. Los países que lo adoptaron se derrumbaron, lo abandonaron o languidecieron en unas dictaduras retrógradas.

That is why when the stars are out they are visible but when the lights are out they are invisible and why it is that when I wind up my watch it starts, but when I wind up this poem it ends.

By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined "despotism" down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers. At

When robotic cars are ubiquitous, they could save more than a million lives a year, becoming one of the greatest gifts to human life since the invention of antibiotics.

But in 2014, Eisner, in consultation with the World Health Organization, proposed a goal of reducing the rate of global homicide by 50 percent within thirty years.15

Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible's approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own.