Quotes from Steven Pinker

In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world's people have become better off.

Human sacrifice and witch-burnings are just two examples of the harm that can result from people pursuing ends that involve figments of their imagination.

As an experimental psychologist I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores. To

From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough."6

We are verbivores, a species that lives on words.

nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," said the ever-merciful God as he exiled Adam and Eve from Eden, and for most people throughout history, sweat they did.

Intuitive probability is driven by imaginability: the easier something is to visualize, the likelier it seems. This entraps us into what Tversky and Kahneman call the conjunction fallacy, in which a conjunction is more intuitively probable than either of its elements.

The most common motives for homicide are moralistic: retaliation after an insult, escalation of a domestic quarrel, punishing an unfaithful or deserting romantic partner, and other acts of jealousy, revenge, and self-defense.

We have come a long way to arrive at an age in which one-pound preemies are rescued with heroic surgery, children are not expected to be economically productive until their fourth decade, and violence against children has been defined down to dodgeball.

one can imagine a leader who has a changing willingness to suffer a cost over time, increasing as the conflict proceeds and his resolve toughens. His motto would be: "We fight on so that our boys shall not have died in vain." This mindset, known as loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

This one broaches the topic in still another way: what we can learn about our makeup from the way people put their thoughts and feelings in words.

Benjamin Franklin observed, "So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now. —Barack Obama, 2016

Human nature may be studied, just as anything else in the world may be. And our decisions on how to organize our lives can take the facts of human nature into account—including the discounting of our own intuitions when a scientific understanding casts them in doubt.

We concoct neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope).

Language is a window into human nature, exposing deep and universal features of our thoughts and feelings.

A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

We see the clash between nationalism and humanism in morbid patriotic slogans like "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" (Sweet and right it is to die for your country) and "Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.

The San of the Kalahari, once called "the original affluent society," turn out to work at least eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, on food alone.

the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond. Speech

A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other's fallacies.

The Crusades were an upwelling of religious idealism that were marked by a few excesses but left the world with the fruits of cultural exchange. The Crusades were a series of vicious pogroms against Jewish communities that were part of a long history of European anti-Semitism. The Crusades were a brutal invasion of Muslim lands and the start of a long history of humiliation of Islam by Christendom. •

The Darwinian approach to sex is often attacked as being antifeminist, but that is just wrong. Indeed, the accusation is baffling on the face of it, especially to the many feminist women who have developed and tested the theory. The core of feminism is surely the goal of ending sexual discrimination and exploitation, an ethical and political position that is in no danger of being refuted by any foreseeable scientific theory or discovery.