Quotes from Steven Pinker

No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better

Ä°nsanlar dil konusunda merakl? olmaktan öte tutkuludur. Sebebi belli: Dil zihnin en ula??labilir k?sm?d?r. Ä°nsanlar dil hakk?nda bilgi edinmek ister çünkü bu bilginin insan doÄŸas?n?n iç yüzünü anlamaya yol göstereceÄŸini bilirler.

homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide.

The most decisive repudiation of eugenics invokes classical liberal and libertarian principles: government is not an omnipotent ruler over human existence but an institution with circumscribed powers, and perfecting the genetic makeup of the species is not among them.

If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits.

The historical figures who earned the honorific "So-and-So the Great" were not great artists, scholars, doctors, or inventors, people who enhanced human happiness or wisdom. They were dictators who conquered large swaths of territory and the people in them. If Hitler's luck had held out a bit longer, he probably would have gone down in history as Adolf the Great.

No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note that these memoirs are historically unusual.146 Survivors of earlier genocides had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would only rub in history's harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities, genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for the prosecution.

Imagine the tragedy; then try to imagine it another million times. 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.

Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society's norms.

In addition to beating back hunger, the ability to grow more food from less land has been, on the whole, good for the planet.

Why spend money and blood to invade a country and plunder its treasure when you can just buy it from them at less expense and sell them some of your own?

Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated. They worry more about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether:

The God of the Hebrew Bible, ever merciful, told the first woman, "I will multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.

hándicaps racionales

To show that these rules really are parts of a language engine, one needs to show that they mesh with other mechanisms of language, particularly in ways that would leave common sense and the desire to communicate frustrated.

for an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.

between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

As people ages, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it

The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, "War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Today no respectable public figure in the United States, Britain, or Western Europe can casually insult women or sling invidious stereotypes of other races or ethnic groups.

The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the norms surrounding violence has to precede a change in the nuts and bolts of governance.

Los sans del desierto del Kalahari

The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.

Una civilización optimista está abierta a la innovación y no la teme, y se basa en las tradiciones de la crítica.