Quotes from Steven Pinker

there's nothing common about common sense.

If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a "Nikon vs. Canon" Internet discussion group.)

Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!

The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise.

But the fact that experts' assertions about maximum possible life expectancy have repeatedly been shattered (on average five years after they were published) raises the question of whether longevity will increase indefinitely and someday slip the surly bonds of mortality entirely.

men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species

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 of doux commerce, gentle commerce.

Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a "crisis" trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.

Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.

A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos.

The penultimate chapter will lay out how some of today's florid outbursts of irrationality may be understood as the rational pursuit of goals other than an objective understanding of the world.

The preposition into means "to in," namely, "to an interior portion of "; onto stands for "to on"; with stands for "a means of changing something.

we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.

Humans are ingenious at sniffing out minor differences to figure out whom they should despise.

Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived.

Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is.

Moore noted that it is sensible to ask, "This conduct is more evolutionarily successful, but is it good?" The mere fact that the question makes sense shows that evolutionary success and goodness are not the same thing.

In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud, than with behaviorism, social constructionism, and other versions of the Blank Slate. Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.

Genetic individuality gives us our different tastes and needs, and it also sets the stage for strife.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.

We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.85

Human selfishness being what it is, almost everyone kept the pleasant task for themselves.

We can see happiness as the output of an ancient biological feedback system that tracks our progress in pursuing auspicious signs of fitness in a natural environment. We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness.

la falta de atención a los descubrimientos que han transformado la vida para mejor justifica una crítica de nuestra apreciación de la condición humana moderna.