751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out” – or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed.

Political ideologies, too, cannot be defined in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor that SOCIETY IS A FAMILY. The political right likens society to a family commanded by a strict father, the political left to a family cared for by a nurturant parent.

Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.

I don’t consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause.

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for – until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

One way to drive home the futility and evil of war is to tap the distancing power of satire.

Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have gantlets of improbabilities.