If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The media and intelligentsia were partly complicit in Trump's depiction of the world as a dystopia headed for even greater disaster. 'Charge… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And… — 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
As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the… — 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 Image
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
