Quotes About Steven Pinker

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense

Vengeance is no disease: it is necessary for cooperation, preventing a nice guy from being exploited.

In The Blank Slate I argued that two extreme visions of human nature—a Tragic vision that is resigned to its flaws, and a Utopian vision that denies it exists—define the great divide between right-wing and left-wing political ideologies.154

otro morirá.37 La tercera clase de tabú de Tetlock es el contrafáctico herético.

The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud...

Historical data are scarce, not least because suicide, also called "self-murder," used to be a crime in many countries, including England until 1961.

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

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.

Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard professor who has devoted more than ten years to studying the decline in violence, the conclusion is evident: We live in the most peaceful era ever.

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings. [ Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005 ]

The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

This book, by Steven Pinker, is entitled THE BLANK SLATE: THE MODERN DENIAL OF HUMAN NATURE, and which, as the title unambiguously indicates, is a rather thundering broadside fired into the direction of the blank slate establishment. He is Professor of Psychology at MIT, has received many awards for his teaching, and for his earlier books HOW THE MIND WORKS, and THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT.

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology - that progress comes through class struggle, often violent.