Quotes from Steven Pinker

When they held constant all the factors that typically push men into marriage, they found that actually getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter.107 The causal pathway has been pithily explained by Johnny Cash: Because you're mine, I walk the line.

Which policies will in fact bring about things that almost everyone wants, like lasting peace or economic growth? Which will reduce poverty, or violent crime, or illiteracy? A rational society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed.

Also, as Nils Petter Gleditsch and Halvard Buhaug have pointed out, even though an increasing proportion of the world's armed conflicts have involved Islamic countries and insurgencies over the past two decades (from 20 to 38 percent), it's not because those conflicts have increased in number.

Yet in every issue touched by the Rights Revolutions—interracial marriage, the empowerment of women, the tolerance of homosexuality, the punishment of children, and the treatment of animals—the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today's conservatives are more liberal than yesterday's liberals.

Communities can thereby come up with rules that allow true beliefs to emerge from the rough-and-tumble of argument, such as that you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you're allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you're not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you. Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science.

century, the amount of life that people lost to housework—which, not surprisingly, people say is their least favorite way to spend their time—fell almost fourfold, from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011.13 Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.14 For returning "washday" to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.

The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it.

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness and answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in short-term memory. We cannot see in ultraviolet light. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.

Everyone wants someone to help but prefers that it not be them.

El sometimiento de todas nuestras creencias a los juicios de la razón y las evidencias es una destreza antinatural, como la alfabetización y el cálculo, y ha de ser inculcada y cultivada.

Nature is a hanging judge

Una sociedad sin erudición histórica es como una persona sin memoria: engañada, confundida y fácilmente explotada.

The tanginess of a literary metaphor must come from some extra ingredients that spice up a mere overlapping of traits.

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.

As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world's population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

As the decades pass, depressed people are more likely to die of suicide and other causes, so the old people who remain in a sample are the mentally healthier ones, making it seem as if everyone who was born long ago is mentally healthier.

As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a "natural" trait is the same as condoning it.

All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.

If crime is going down, you shouldn't be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.