751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.

In any case, e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a hominid with a restricted vowel space had little language.

As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.

Thinking can not trade in metaphors directly. It must trade in a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic […] while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.

No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn.

Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by.

I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.