Quotes from Steven Pinker

The likelihood that, in attacking a member of your own species, you will get hurt is a powerful selection pressure that disfavors indiscriminate pouncing or lashing out.

Calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic or civilization-clashing. The overwhelming majority of victims of Islamic violence and repression are other Muslims.

grammar specifies how words may combine to express meanings;

Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter?

The sin of ingratitude may not have made the Top Seven, but according to Dante it consigns the sinners to the ninth circle of Hell, and that's where post-1960s intellectual culture may find itself because of its amnesia for the conquerors of disease.

Unfortunately the epistemological standards of common sense—we should credit the people and ideas that make correct predictions, and discount the ones that don't—are rarely applied to the intelligentsia and commentariat, who dispense opinions free of accountability.

States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

An analysis in Bangladesh confirmed that the women who worked in the garment industry (as my grandparents did in 1930s Canada) enjoyed rising wages, later marriage, and fewer and better-educated children.46 Over the course of a generation, slums, barrios, and favelas can morph into suburbs, and the working class can become middle class.47 To appreciate the long-term benefits of industrialization one does not have to accept its cruelties.

Friendship, like other kinds of altruism, is vulnerable to cheaters, and we have a special name for them: fair-weather friends. These sham friends reap the benefits of associating with a valuable person and mimic signs of warmth in an effort to become valued themselves. But when a little rain falls, they are nowhere in sight.

If we dig even deeper to the roots of words, we unearth physical metaphors for still more abstract concepts.

According to Howard, "this dialectic between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, between the individual and the tribe, was to pervade, and to a large extent shape, the history of Europe throughout the nineteenth century, and of the world the century after that."109

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite.

Blasphemy itself could not survive religion: if anyone doubts that let him try to blaspheme Odin.

Polysemy refers to a word's having a number of distinct but related senses, and is different from two other ways in which a sound can have multiple meanings.

Suicides are often hard to distinguish from accidents (particularly when the cause is a poisoning or drug overdose, but also when it is a fall, a car crash, or a gunshot), and coroners may tilt their classifications in times and places in which suicide is stigmatized or criminalized.

Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.

The policy of deterrence is also known as the balance of terror and, during the Cold War, was called mutual assured destruction (MAD). Whatever peace a policy of deterrence may promise is fragile, because deterrence reduces violence only by a threat of violence.

Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge; but that's the problem.

It's as if we think of ideas as things, knowing as having, communicating as sending, and language as the package. 52 This is sometimes called the conduit metaphor, and it can be seen in dozens of expressions for thinking, saying, and teaching.

The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211

As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, "Life was better since the government came" because "a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot.

Any movement that calls itself "scientific" but fails to nurture opportunities for the testing of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

After noting Snow's "utter lack of intellectual distinction and . . . embarrassing vulgarity of style," Leavis scoffed at a value system in which "'standard of living' is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim.

The fact that mean measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is ok. That the environment got better by itself or that we can just sit back and relax for the cleaner environment that we enjoy today, we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulation, treaties and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.