“Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“For most of the history of civilization, the practice of slavery was the rule rather than the exception.” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“and here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity, for they show that nostalgia for a… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The historical figures who earned the honorific “So-and-So the Great” were not great artists, scholars, doctors, or inventors, people who enhanced human… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Self-control has been credited with one of the greatest reductions of violence in history, the thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The world has far too much morality, at least in the sense of activity of people's moral instincts. If you look, and… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“According to Howard, “this dialectic between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, between the individual and the tribe, was to pervade, and to a large… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. — Steven Pinker Copy Share
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
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… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
