Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about… — 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
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“discriminate between the principles that improve the quality of prose and the superstitions, fetishes, shibboleths, and initiation ordeals that have been passed… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Strunk was born in 1869, and today’s writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life. — 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
