751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

[A]s moral philosophers through the ages have pointed out, a philosophy of living based on “Not everyone, just me!” falls apart as soon as one sees oneself from an objective standpoint as a person just like others. It is like insisting that “here,” the point in space one happens to be occupying at the moment, is a special place in the universe.

You can only really understand something when you know what it is not.

El Dios de la Biblia hebrea, siempre misericordioso, dijo a la primera mujer: -Tantas haré tus fatigas cuantos sean tus embarazos: con dolor parirás los hijos-. Hasta hace poco tiempo, en torno a 1% de las madres morían en el parto; para una mujer estadounidense, estar embarazada hace un siglo era casi tan peligroso como tener cáncer de mama en la actualidad.

What’s going on? On the one hand, analogical thinking seems to be our birthright. Metaphorical connections saturate our language, drive our science, enliven our literature, burst out (at least occasionally) in children’s speech, and remind us of things past. On the other hand, when experimentalists lead the horse to water, they can’t make it drink.

The urban planner Donald Sean has argued that an ‘urban blight’ metaphor led planners to treat crowded neighbourhoods as if they were diseased plants, which had to be extirpated to prevent the spread of rot. The result was the disastrous urban renewal projects the 1960s.

Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.

…at the other end of the shelf, the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language is truly a surprising discovery, rich with implications. Even the killjoy has to admit that metaphors were alive in the minds of the original coiners and compelling to the early adopters.

The tanginess of a literary metaphor must come from some extra ingredients that spice up a mere overlapping of traits.

… if some metaphors can persist in the language as fossils, it puts every metaphor under a cloud of suspicion.