Quotes from Steven Pinker

Changes that take place on the scale of journalism will always show ups and downs. Solutions create new problems, which take time to solve in their term. But when we stand back from these blips and setbacks, we see that the indicators of human progress are cumulative: none is cyclical, with gains reliably cancelled by losses.

The asymmetry has been confirmed in the lab by showing that people will take a bigger gamble to avoid a sure loss than to improve on a sure gain

We learn that CONTROL IS UP because we experience fights in which the victor ends up on top, that GOALS ARE DESTINATIONS because we walk toward something we want, and that TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT because things that approach us get closer and closer as time elapses.

men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

If contemporary humans seem irrational, don't blame the hunter-gatherers.

raped, or killed, and it's hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning

We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.

Also, people single out freedom as a component of a meaningful life, whether or not it leads to a happy life.11 Like Frank Sinatra, they may have regrets, they may take blows, but they do it their way.

As people age, 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.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:

Brain cells fire in patterns.

The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.

In general, referring to a person by a body part, physical trait, or typical accoutrement—that is, by a metonym—is dysphemistic.

One doesn't have to invoke dominance to explain why Genghis Khan inseminated so many women that his Y chromosome is common in Central Asia today; it's enough to observe that he killed the women's fathers and husbands.

However much one admires the improved views of the Boston waterfront, the lines of the stealth bomber, or the acting skills of Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, or indeed of the gorilla in King Kong, this still seems like a very good deal.

These "anthropologists of peace" (who in fact are rather aggressive academics—the ethologist Johan van der Dennen calls them the Peace and Harmony Mafia) have maintained that humans and other animals are strongly inhibited from killing their own kind, that war is a recent invention, and that fighting among native peoples was ritualistic and harmless until they encountered European colonists.10

In Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, the psychologist Michael McCullough shows that we do have this dimmer switch for revenge.

Quienes condenan a las modernas sociedades capitalistas por su insensibilidad hacia los pobres probablemente ignoran lo poco que las sociedades precapitalistas del pasado invertían en el alivio de la pobreza.

While some additional plots were foiled by the Department of Homeland Security, many of their claims have turned out to be the proverbial elephant repellent, with every elephant-free day serving as proof of its effectiveness.

A "spirituality" that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don't care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. —Carl Sagan

The ordering of events is in the right direction: technological advances in publishing, the mass production of books, the expansion of literacy, and the popularity of the novel all preceded the major humanitarian reforms of the 18th century.

As impressive as the conquest of infectious disease in Europe and America was, the ongoing progress among the global poor is even more astonishing.

La irreligiosidad es una consecuencia natural de la riqueza y la educación.

As people age, 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.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:5