Quotes from Steven Pinker

But now the Boy Gender has lost another battle in its age-old war with camp counselors, phys ed teachers, lawyers, and moms. In school district after school district, dodgeball has been banned.

It's not immediately obvious why, out of all the weapons of war, poison gas was singled out as uniquely abominable—as so uncivilized that even the Nazis kept it off the battlefield.

As religious issues came to dominate political ones, any negotiations with the enemies of one state looked more and more like heresy and treason. The questions which divided Catholics from Protestants had ceased to be negotiable. Consequently . . . diplomatic contacts diminished."98 It would not be the last time ideological fervor would act as an accelerant to a military conflagration.

Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

It's highly unpleasant to be gassed, but then it's just as unpleasant to be perforated or shredded by pieces of metal.

As Homer Simpson said to Marge when she warned him that he would regret his conduct, "That's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy.

In the first list, the agent applies force to the substance and the surface simultaneously, by pushing one against the other. In the second, the agent allows gravity to do the work. It's the difference between causing and letting, between acting on something directly and acting on it via an intermediary force, between expecting something to change as one is doing something in real time and expecting it to change shortly after one has done something.

If this trend continues, the 20th century should go down as the last during which tens of millions of people died for lack of access to food.

boor (which originally just meant "farmer," as in the German Bauer and Dutch boer); villain (from the French vilein, a serf or villager); churlish (from English churl, a commoner); vulgar (common, as in the term vulgate); and ignoble, not an aristocrat.

When I surveyed perceptions of violence in an Internet questionnaire, people guessed that 20th-century England was about 14 percent more violent than 14th-century England. In fact it was 95 percent less violent.

Moving" and "changing" are not enough grounds for the mind to construe an event in a particular way. It also cares about finer-grained concepts like forcing versus enabling a force, causing versus letting, and before-and-after versus at-the-same-time.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.

in which I argued that human beings are fitted by evolution with a number of destructive motives such as greed, lust, dominance, vengeance, and self-deception.

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!"—Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?

Relativists have a point when they say that we don't just open our eyes and apprehend reality, as if perception were a window through which the soul gazes at the world. The idea that we just see things as they are is called naïve realism, and it was refuted by skeptical philosophers thousands of years ago with the help of a simple phenomenon: visual illusions.

Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness.

As Thomas Hobbes noted in 1651, "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.

emit, excrete, expectorate, expel, exude, secrete, spew, spit, vomit This disgusting list is made up of verbs in which the substance is expelled from inside a volume, though they differ in the kind of volume, the nature of the orifice, what the substance is, and how it is expelled.

The next step in the historic trend toward greater social spending may be a universal basic income (or its close relative, a negative income tax). The idea has been bruited for decades, and its day may be coming.

I have never killed a man , but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.

By today's sensibilities, it's more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution.

Human life is a cardinal value that trumps social norms, social stability, or obedience to the law.

The English language is a rich verbal tapestry woven together from the tongues of the Greeks, the Latins, the Angles, the Klaxtons, the Celtics, and many more other ancient peoples, all of whom had severe drinking problems." Let