Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning… — 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
Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics… — 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
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
Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and… — 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
In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way… — 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
