Quotes from Steven Pinker

My laptop has freed me to travel.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets. Not coincidentally, these were the major brainchildren of the Enlightenment

the compartmentalization of the moral sense, and the distribution of belief and enforcement among different sectors of a population, can lead to ideologically driven wars and genocides even in otherwise civilized societies.

A recent one entitled "Is There an Epidemic of Child or Adolescent Depression?" vindicated Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.

What's going on? On the one hand, analogical thinking seems to be our birthright. Metaphorical connections saturate our language, drive our science, enliven our literature, burst out (at least occasionally) in children's speech, and remind us of things past. On the other hand, when experimentalists lead the horse to water, they can't make it drink.

Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.

no individual can afford to be the only honest one in a community of self-enhancers.89

What grabs our mental spotlight is illicit sex, violent death, and Walter Mittyish leaps of status. Now

Inborn human desires are a nuisance to those with utopian and totalitarian visions, which often amount to the same thing.

Often people have an instant intuition that an action is immoral, and then struggle, often unsuccessfully, to come up with reasons why it is immoral.169

Put yourself in the booties of a child who is in the midst of figuring out how to speak the language as it is spoken by parents, friends, and siblings.

Other surveys show the same shifts.

progreso» no guiado por el humanismo no es progreso.

The difference between explaining behavior and excusing it is captured in the saying To understand is not to forgive.

And ideology is a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of utopia, that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good.

Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them.

it's hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning, or commerce if the institutions that support them are looted and burned as quickly as they are built.

It is a bad idea to say that discrimination is wrong only because the traits of all people are indistinguishable. It is a bad idea to say that violence and exploitation are wrong only because people are not naturally inclined to them. It is a bad idea to say that people are responsible for their actions only because the causes of those actions are mysterious. It is a bad idea to say that our motives are meaningful in a personal sense only because they are inexplicable in a biological sense.

Reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions.

The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.

As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.