Quotes from Steven Pinker

If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.

Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening at once. Space is nature's way to keep everything from happening to me.

Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, "natural" in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don't want it.

Nor is it sweet and right to clasp death in order to prevent a province from seceding, expand a sphere of influence, or carry out an irredentist crusade

If there's anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

you have to acknowledge the possibility that generative metaphors are a major phenomenon in language and an important clue to our cognitive makeup. Abstract ideas are connected in a systematic way to more concrete experiences.

Evidence-free pronouncements about the misery of mankind are an occupational hazard of the social critic. In the 1854 classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ.

For those who need data to be convinced, in global surveys of values in which every variable that social scientists like to measure is thrown into the pot (including income, education, and dependence on oil revenues), Islam itself predicts an extra dose of patriarchal and other illiberal values across countries and individuals.

The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.

There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power.

We value people not just for what they do but for what they are.

What launched the Great Escape? The most obvious cause was the application of science to the improvement of material life, leading to what the economic historian Joel Mokyr calls "the enlightened economy.

The allergy to evolution in the social and cognitive sciences has been, I think, a barrier to understanding.

being happy might make people supportive, generous, and conscientious rather than the other way around.

People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It's hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we are apt to forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago, and to be blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out.

When energy is poured into a system, and the system dissipates that energy in its slide toward entropy, it can become poised in an orderly, indeed beautiful, configuration—a sphere, spiral, starburst, whirlpool, ripple, crystal, or fractal.

To appreciate this burden, one doesn't have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions

The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.

Here is Eisner's one-sentence summary of how to halve the homicide rate within three decades: "An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to sustainable reductions in lethal violence."32 The adjectives effective, legitimate, swift, fair, moderate, and humane differentiate his advice from the get-tough-on-crime rhetoric favored by right-wing politicians.

The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python.

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

Hobbes believed that people could escape this hellish existence only by surrendering their autonomy to a sovereign person or assembly. He called it a leviathan, the Hebrew word for a monstrous sea creature subdued by Yahweh at the dawn of creation. Much depends on which of these armchair anthropologists is correct.

the problem of meaning, like many mysteries in philosophy, may always be shrouded in enigma, because it pushes our common sense into conceptual realms that it did not evolve to think in.

According to Radical Pragmatics, a permanently existing conceptual structure underlying the meaning of a word is also as mythical as the Jack of Spades, because people can use a word to mean almost anything, depending on the context.