751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

Plants can’t very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

Man has no nature; what he has is history.

Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they’re less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people’s lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore.

As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47.

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world’s ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence. The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune maybe no one’s fault.

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven’t given much thought to the connections.

An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility – just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.