Quotes from Steven Pinker

Beneficial historical developments often create losers together with the winners, and the apparent economic losers of globalization (namely the lower classes of rich countries) are often said to be the supporters of authoritarian populism. For

Controversies remain over the details, but today no biologist doubts that evolutionary dynamics like mutualism, kinship, and various forms of reciprocity can select for psychological faculties that, under the right circumstances, can lead people to coexist peacefully.4

I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005."43 (The same observation has been made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.)

people are happy when they feel better off than their neighbors, unhappy when they feel worse off.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of…"), but with a contenful observation that provokes curiosity

The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

And in any case one should not confuse clarity with condescension.

Ever-creative Homo sapiens had long fought back against disease with quackery such as prayer, sacrifice, bloodletting, cupping, toxic metals, homeopathy, and squeezing a hen to death against an infected body part.

progress is an outcome not of magic but of problem-solving.

A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn't exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patted by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.

The amount of violence in a society is more closely related to its inequality than to its poverty.

We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing

A]s moral philosophers through the ages have pointed out, a philosophy of living based on "Not everyone, just me!" falls apart as soon as one sees oneself from an objective standpoint as a person just like others. It is like insisting that "here," the point in space one happens to be occupying at the moment, is a special place in the universe.

The cluster illusion, like other post hoc fallacies in probability, is the source of many superstitions: that bad things happen in threes, people are born under a bad sign, or an annus horribilis means the world is falling apart. When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.

For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, "Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?

Rather, there is friction between the speaker's square peg and the listener's round hole, and that friction itself conveys information in a parallel stream.

In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don'ts.

mitigate and credible and credulous. What this means

never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science

Si algo no puede continuar indefinidamente, puede continuar mucho más tiempo del que piensas».

people adapt to their circumstances, good or bad, the way their eyes adapt to sun or darkness. From that neutral point, improvement is happiness, loss is misery.

People are surprised to learn that if 23 people are in a room, the chances that two will share a birthday are better than even. With 57 in the room, the odds rise to 99 percent. Though it's unlikely that anyone in the room will share my birthday, we're not looking for matches with me, or with anyone else singled out a priori. We're counting matches post hoc, and there are 366 ways for a match to occur.

Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.