751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.

When energy is poured into a system, and the system dissipates that energy in its slide toward entropy, it can become poised in an orderly, indeed beautiful, configuration – a sphere, spiral, starburst, whirlpool, ripple, crystal, or fractal. The fact that we find these configurations beautiful, incidentally, suggests that beauty may not just be in the eye of the beholder. The brain’s aesthetic response may be a receptiveness to the counter-entropic patterns that can spring forth from nature.

The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases.

Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever fought in a war.

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution.

Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.

When I grew up, bullying was considered a natural part of boyhood. It would have strained belief to think that someday the president of the United States would deliver a speech about its evils, as Barack Obama did in 2011. As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.

Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.