Quotes About Pinker

For anyone wishing to argue that once things were worse than they are now, the Middle Ages are ideal. It is widely supposed that having gotten out of them was one of the accomplishments of modern civilization. No contemporary scholar, one might think, would make such a mistake in judgment. A one-man multitude, Pinker champions the case to the contrary. "The people of the middle ages were, in a word, gross."31

But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

Los hechos, sin duda, le dan la razón a Pinker, pero las voces más ruidosas no. El resultado es que, desde que Pinker escribió La tabla rasa, nuestras sociedades se han enrocado en la ilusión de que las diferencias biológicas —incluidas las diferencias de aptitud— pueden evitarse, negarse o soslayarse. Algo similar ha ocurrido con las diferencias sociales.

Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth.

The two deepest questions about the mind are "What makes intelligence possible?" and "What makes consciousness possible?

It's really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym.

The amount of violence in a society is more closely related to its inequality than to its poverty.

Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. —Carl Sagan

Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank's Knowledge Index

Spam is not, as some people believe, an acronym for Short, Pointless, and Annoying Messages.

But this book is about semantics, and I would not make a claim on your attention if I did not think that the relation of language to our inner and outer worlds was a matter of intellectual fascination and real-world importance.

Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the crime decline, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts.

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

Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park. It is under such an oversensitive bull***t detector that I have been writing this book.