Quotes from Steven Pinker

The errors could have been avoided by mentally moving the who or whom back into the gap and sounding out the sentence (or, if your intuitions about who and whom are squishy, inserting he or him in the gap instead).

The goal of drawing a smooth border through the fractal of interpenetrating ethnic groups is an unsolvable geometry problem, and living with existing borders is now considered better than endless attempts to square the circle, with its invitations to ethnic cleansing and irredentist conquest.

Forty years ago two-thirds of children walked or biked to school; today 10 percent do. A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209

Populism is an old man's movement.

According to studies of writing quality, a varied vocabulary and the use of unusual words are two of the features that distinguish sprightly prose from mush.

If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.

According to Linguistic Determinism, the language we speak is the language of thought, or at least structures it in major ways.

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune may be no one's fault.

The question is whether language determines thought—whether the language we speak makes it difficult or impossible to think certain thoughts, or alters the way we think in surprising or consequential ways.

En la práctica, consumismo significa con frecuencia -consumo por parte de los demás-, pues las élites que lo condenan tienden a ser ellas mismas consumidoras conspicuas de lujos exorbitantes como libros de tapa dura, buena comida y buen vino, representaciones artísticas en directo, viajes al extranjero y educación en instituciones prestigiosas para sus hijos.

In the earlier centuries the upper and lower social classes engaged in homicide at comparable rates. But as the homicide rate fell, it dropped far more precipitously among the upper classes than among the lower ones, an important social change

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won't punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available.

Well before Africans were enslaved by Europeans, they were enslaved by other Africans, as well as by Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East. Some of those states did not abolish legal slavery until recently: Qatar in 1952; Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962; Mauritania in 1980.

Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause. In

This cognitive illusion was first noted in 1968 by the mathematician William Feller in his classic textbook on probability: "To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster."33 Here are a few examples of the cluster illusion. The

En un viejo chiste, un orador callejero se dirige a una multitud hablando sobre las glorias del comunismo: -¡Cuando llegue la revolución, todos comerán fresas con nata!- Desde la parte delantera, un hombre exclama: -Pero ¡a mí no me gustan las fresas con nata!- El orador brama: -¡Cuando llegue la revolución, te gustarán las fresas con nata!

If you have to silence people who disagree with you, does that mean you have no good arguments for why they're mistaken?

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it's a duck, it's likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain meat that's tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce.

technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that "over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.