An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets. – Steven Pinker
Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism. – Steven Pinker
Everyone’s pedigree merges into everyone else’s pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related. – Steven Pinker
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. – Steven Pinker
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of… our mental faculties. – Steven Pinker
Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family. – Steven Pinker
We’re living in primate heaven. We’re warm, dry, we’re not hungry, we don’t have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable? – Steven Pinker
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time. – Steven Pinker
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I’m an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation. – Steven Pinker
The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. – Steven Pinker
Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. – Steven Pinker
One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected. – Steven Pinker
As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we’re interested in what makes one person different from another. We’ve got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another. – Steven Pinker
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it’s not a perfect correlation, and it doesn’t have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change. – Steven Pinker
There’s a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it’s fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, ‘Why even try to work toward peace if we’re just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?’ – Steven Pinker
I don’t think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools. – Steven Pinker
For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor – and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. – Steven Pinker
Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today’s Republican party, just as the two Georges – the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern – found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972. – Steven Pinker
In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them. – Steven Pinker
No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you’re still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. – Steven Pinker
We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them. – Steven Pinker
My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one’s convictions can be subjected to empirical test. – Steven Pinker
A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads – and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don’t have to become violent in self-defence. – Steven Pinker
A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common – a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature. – Steven Pinker
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? – Steven Pinker
Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. – Steven Pinker
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I’m writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it’s like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can. – Steven Pinker