Quotes from Steven Pinker

Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us. We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds.

Naming a child is the only opportunity that most people get to anoint an entity in the world with a word of their choosing.

Concepts of space seem to infect other concepts as well, as we saw in the first chapter when noting the way that people count and measure out events as if they were objects made of time-stuff. People also use space as a model for an abstract continuum when they speak of the rising or falling of their paycheck, their weight, or their spirits,38 or when they plot data points, representing anything whatsoever, on graph paper.

A definition is a dictionary's explanation of the meaning of an English word using other English words, intended to be read by a whole person, applying the entirety of his or her intelligence and language skills.

Scheidel concludes, "All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for."28

Beelzebug n. Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

The mindless repetition of the word spam inspired late-1980s hackers to use it as a verb for flooding newsgroups with identical messages, and a decade later it spread from their subculture to the populace at large.

When we agglomerate events through the wide-angle lens of history, which sees only the acts of influential leaders, a causative verb will cut the chain at the link immediately connected to the outcome.

When the term ham sandwich can refer to a man sitting at a lunch counter, there seems to be little hope for the logician's dream that the expressions in a language can be mapped onto states of the world according to a fixed set of pointers.

The verb gerrymander comes from a nineteenth-century American cartoon showing a political district that had been crafted by a Governor Elbridge Gerry into a tortuous shape resembling a salamander in an effort to concentrate his opponent's voters into a single seat.

Because our propositional reasoning frees us from similarity and stereotypes, it enables the highest achievements of human rationality, such as science, morality, and law.

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, You gotta understand, It's just our bringin' up-ke, That gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!

Because in the twenty-first century, when we think by the seat of our pants, every correction can make things worse, and can send our democracy into a graveyard spiral.

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.

It is a real puzzle for the science of mind why, when an unpleasant event befalls us—we slice our thumb along with the bagel, or knock a glass of beer into our lap—the topic of our conversation turns abruptly to sexuality, excretion, or religion.

the same time, the mental health professions, and perhaps the culture at large, has been lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness.

The overall picture that has emerged from the study of the compassionate brain is that there is no empathy center with empathy neurons, but complex patterns of activation and modulation that depend on perceivers' interpretation of the straits of another person and the nature of their relationship with the person.

The population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion, which is about two and a half times the population in 1800, four and a half times that in 1600, seven times that in 1300, and fifteen times that of 1 CE. So the death count of a war in 1600, for instance, would have to be multiplied by 4.5 for us to compare its destructiveness to those in the middle of the 20th century.9

I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.

If I use the verb pour, my field of vision narrows to how the water is caused to move, ignoring its destination; that's the reason we can say pour the water but not pour the glass. But if I use the verb fill, my field of vision narrows to the resulting fullness of the glass, ignoring the trajectory of the water; that's why we say fill the glass but not fill the water.

Since any defense of reason, science, and humanism would count for nothing if, two hundred and fifty years after the Enlightenment, we're no better off than our ancestors in the Dark Ages, an appraisal of human progress is where the case must begin.

Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time.

For these reasons, oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle hormone. The reuse of the hormone in so many forms of human closeness supports a suggestion by Batson that maternal care is the evolutionary precursor of other forms of human sympathy.

Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about fifty Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than four thousand Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.