751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

In our society, the best predictor of a man’s wealth is his wife’s looks, and the best predictor of a woman’s looks is her husband’s wealth.

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.

Everything in human affairs is connected to everything else, and that is especially true of violence. Across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in trade.

Any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism.” A.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too.

Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative.

Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless.

To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science – skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing – are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge.