Quotes from Steven Pinker

For returning "washday" to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.

As we saw in chapter 3, one way the early modern Europeans used Odyssean self-control was to keep sharp knives out of reach at the dinner table.

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes' forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.

our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty—all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

Scandinavians needed a couple of additional centuries before they thought the better of killing each other, and Italians didn't get serious about it until the 19th century. But by the 20th century the annual homicide rate of every Western European country had fallen into a narrow band centered on 1 per 100,000.

The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call "self-help.

After all, in the absence of electoral reform the richest donors can get the ear of politicians whether they earn 2 percent of national income or 8 percent of it.20

And with an average trial length at the time of eight and a half minutes, it is certain that many of the people sent to the gallows were innocent.67 Rummel estimates that between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

The sequence of bases in a DNA molecule correlates with the sequence of amino acids in the proteins that make up the organism's body, and they got that sequence by structuring the organism's ancestors—reducing their entropy—into the improbable configurations that allowed them to capture energy and grow and reproduce.

The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures.

Every statistics student is warned that "statistical significance" is a technical concept that should not be confused with "significance" in the vernacular sense of noteworthy or consequential.

Because verbs have the power to dictate how a sentence conveys who did what to whom, one cannot sort out the roles in a sentence without looking up the verb. That is why your grammar teacher got it wrong when she told you that the subject of the sentence is the "doer of the action." The subject of the sentence is often the doer, but only when the verb says so;

As Richard Lederer points out in Crazy English, we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway, there is no ham in hamburger or bread in sweetbreads, and blueberries are blue but cranberries are not cran. But think about the "sane" alternative of depicting a concept so that receivers can apprehend the meaning in the form.

The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.

OLD ENGLISH (c. 1000): Faeder ure thu the eart on heofonum, si thin nama gehalgod. Tobecume thin rice. Gewurthe in willa on eorthan swa swa on heofonum.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, "If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.") Many Enlightenment thinkers, including Montesquieu, Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, endorsed the ideal

The linguist Noam Chomsky once suggested that our igno- rance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

evil, in fact, is perpetrated by people who are mostly ordinary and who respond to their circumstances, including provocation by the victim, in ways that they feel are reasonable and just.

when things change without a human agent directing the change, they are likely to change for the worse.

The fact that a hypothesis is politically uncomfortable does not mean that it is false, but it does mean that we should consider the evidence very carefully before concluding that it is true.

People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.

articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the arbitrariness of the sign," the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means "dog" just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning.