Quotes from Steven Pinker

To acknowledge that the lives of the lower and middle classes of developed countries have improved in recent decades is not to deny the formidable problems facing 21st-century economies.

Most hunter-gatherer tribes have plenty of people in their seventies and even some in their eighties. Though a Hadza woman's life expectancy at birth is 32.5 years, if she makes it to 45 she can expect to live another 21 years.

Once the secrets to growing food in abundance are unlocked and the infrastructure to move it around is in place, the decline of famine depends on the decline of poverty, war, and autocracy.

No matter how old you are, you have more years ahead of you than people of your age did in earlier decades and centuries.

fallaciously pessimistic.

People dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than the savor good fortune, and that they are more stubd by criticism then they are heartened by praise.

Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on. But this strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines, and the statement gave no indication that we might have good reasons to prefer understanding and know-how to ignorance and superstition

The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.

Dile a la gente que hay un hombre invisible en el cielo que creó el universo y la inmensa mayoría te creerá. Dile que la pintura está húmeda y tendrá que tocar para asegurarse.

As Europe became more urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, industrialized, and secular, it got safer and safer.

I've seen the answer: some of them figure, "If that's what science is, I might as well make money!" Four years later their brainpower is applied to thinking up algorithms that allow hedge funds to act on financial information a few milliseconds faster rather than to finding new treatments for Alzheimer's disease or technologies for carbon capture and storage.

The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.

Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.

And no, the extra years of life will not be spent senile in a rocking chair. Of course the longer you live, the more of those years you'll live as an older person, with its inevitable aches and pains. But bodies that are better at resisting a mortal blow are also better at resisting the lesser assaults of disease, injury, and wear.

People dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise

legítimas, rápidas, justas, moderados y humanas diferencian sus consejos de la retórica de la mano dura contra la delincuencia preferida por los políticos de derechas.

Today 8 percent of the men who live within the former territory of the Mongol Empire share a Y chromosome that dates to around the time of Genghis, most likely because they descended from him and

people today live far more years in the pink of health than their ancestors lived altogether, healthy and infirm years combined

In fact, as of May 15, 1984, the major powers of the world had remained at peace with one another for the longest stretch of time since the Roman Empire.

Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the poor are probably unaware of how little pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief. It's not just that they had less to spend in absolute terms; they spent a smaller proportion of their wealth. (2010s USA would be considered uber-socialist to 1960s USA).

disasters are instant, improvements are gradual

For decades, journalism's steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump's seeds of discontent and despair to take root. . .

What about a more abstract sense of "spirituality"? If it consists in gratitude for one's existence, awe at the beauty and immensity of the universe, and humility before the frontiers of human understanding, then spirituality is indeed an experience that makes life worth living—and one that is lifted into higher dimensions by the revelations of science and philosophy.

As for government euphemism, it is contemptible not because it is a form of mind control but because it is a form of lying.