Quotes from Steven Pinker

The Devil's Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity.

The best way to understand an idea is to 'see what it is NOT' , so putting the alternatives to humanisation under the microscope can remind us what is at stake in advancing the ideals of the Enlightenment.

El romántico movimiento verde no ve la captación humana de energía como una forma de resistir la entropía y promover la prosperidad humana, sino como un crimen atroz contra la naturaleza, que conducirá a una guerra de recursos, aire y agua contaminados y que comportará un cambio climático que acabará con la civilización.

Ecomodernists point out that organic farming, which needs far more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.)

A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.

A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with "Love thy neighbor" and "All men are created equal," is the one on the bumper sticker: "Shit happens.

If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the

For many people the greatest fear raised by the prospect of a longer life is dementia, but another pleasant surprise has come to light: between 2000 and 2012, the rate among Americans over 65 fell by a quarter, and the average age at diagnosis rose from 80.7 to 82.4 years.

Though bad writing has always been with us, the rules of correct usage are the smallest part of the problem. Any competent copy editor can turn a passage that is turgid, opaque, and filled with grammatical errors into a passage that is turgid, opaque, and free of grammatical errors. Rules of usage are well worth mastering, but they pale in importance behind principles of clarity, style, coherence, and consideration for the reader.

Door aan het licht te brengen dat de wetten die in het universum gelden geen doel hebben, dwingen wetenschappelijke krachten ons verantwoordelijkheid te nemen voor ons eigen welzijn, onze soort en onze planeet.

Finally, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs - the escalator of reason - can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to re-frame violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.

One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline.

Many scholars in "science studies" devote their careers to recondite analyses of how the whole institution is just a pretext for oppression.

The economist Steven Radelet has pointed out that "the improvements in health among the global poor in the last few decades are so large and widespread that they rank among the greatest achievements in human history.

The geometry of beauty is the visible signal of adaptively valuable objects: safe, food-rich, explorable, learnable habitats, and fertile, healthy dates, mates, and babies.

The recoognition of a right to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure the rights are too tepid for a morally viable society.

The energy analyst Robert Bryce estimates that simply keeping up with the world's increase in energy use would require turning an area the size of Germany into wind farms every year.

Eisner, together with the historian Randolph Roth, notes that crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.

Children acquire spoken language instinctively but written language only by the sweat of their brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention.

The invention of farming around ten thousand years ago multiplied the availability of calories from cultivated plants and domesticated animals, freed a portion of the population from the demands of hunting and gathering, and eventually gave them the luxury of writing, thinking, and accumulating their ideas.

an exception: in the sentence I asked him what he thought of my review in his book, and his response was unprintable, the word unprintable means something much more specific than "incapable of being printed.") The

And every word has at most one inflectional suffix. We never get opensed or opensing, nor do the plural -s and possessive s stack up when several owners own something: the dogs' blanket, not the dogs's (dogzez) blanket. Finally

Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an explanation of why specialists use so much idiosyncratic terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and zombie nouns. They are not trying to bamboozle us; that's just the way they think.