751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts – decoration of surfaces and bodies – appears to be a human universal.

There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.

You can write with clarity and with flair, too. And though the emphasis is on nonfiction, the explanations should be useful to fiction writers as well, because many principles of style apply whether the world being written about is real or imaginary. I like to think they might also be helpful to poets, orators, and other creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose to flout them for rhetorical effect.

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.

The reason I’m not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

So if the language is our guide, the lofty declaration of abstract principles is really a story with a strange and clunky plot. Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers’ view of what forced them to do the cutting.

Leaders began to profess their love of peace and to claim that war had been forced upon them.118 As Mueller notes, “No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Gradually this was changed to ‘I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.’ This might be seen as progress.”119.

The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution.

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things – not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.