Quotes from Steven Pinker

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.

In the United States, Canada, and Australia, fewer than 3 percent of women report that their partners assaulted them in the previous year, but the reports from other countries are an order of magnitude higher: 27 percent in a Nicaraguan sample, 38 percent in a Korean sample, and 52 percent in a Palestinian sample.

A lot follows from the idea that the mind is a metaphor-monger.

progress" unguided by humanism is not progress.

The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one.

Darwin's words, "If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Third, children do pick up the pattern.

Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups.

Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing.

Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold businesspeople in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.

Fourth—and here's where the paradox arises—the generalization runs up against counterexamples in both directions. There are verbs that appear only with the prepositional dative: Goldie drove her minibus to the lake. *Goldie drove the lake her minibus.

Perpetual Peace," Kant laid out measures that would discourage leaders from dragging their countries into war.20 Together with international commerce, he recommended representative republics (what we would call democracies), mutual transparency, norms against conquest and internal interference, freedom of travel and immigration, and a federation of states that would adjudicate disputes between them.

Among the reasons there was no such crisis was that cathode-ray tubes were superseded by liquid crystal displays made of common elements.

Though truth-telling sheds no blood, it requires a painful emotional sacrifice on the part of the confessors in the form of shame, guilt, and a unilateral disarmament of their chief moral weapon, the claim to innocence.

Saying something to your child and then realizing that you sound like one of your own parents: deja vieux, mamamorphosis, mnemomic, patterfamilias, vox pop, nagativism, parentriloquism.

It begins with skepticism.147 The history of human folly, and 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.

Some of the regressive customs found in Muslim-majority countries, such as female genital mutilation and "honor killings" of unchaste sisters and daughters, are ancient African or West Asian tribal practices and are misattributed by their perpetrators to Islamic law. Some

The parents of today who complain about the iPods and cell phones that are soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their transistor radios.

It's not just the salience of a horrific event that stokes the terror. Our emotions are far more engaged when the cause of a tragedy is malevolent intent rather than accidental misfortune.

Archer found that countries in which women are better represented in government and the professions, and in which they earn a larger proportion of earned income, are less likely to have women at the receiving end of spousal abuse.

Spam is not, as some people believe, an acronym for Short, Pointless, and Annoying Messages.

And fifth, the promiscuous verbs and monogamous verbs seem to convey the same kinds of meanings.

Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what's rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).17

their lack of empathy imposes no brake on the punishment they mete out to real or imagined opponents. Nor does it allow any consideration of the human costs of another of their DSM symptoms: their "fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love," which may be realized in rapacious conquest, pharaonic construction projects, or utopian master plans. And we have already seen what overconfidence can do in the waging of war.