751 Quotes by Steven Pinker

In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009, there were no interstate conflicts at all.

Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold business people in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.

Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today’s Republican party, just as the two Georges – the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern – found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972.

In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.

For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren’t as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn’t care. We used euphemisms like ‘sackings’ and ‘sieges’ instead of calling them ‘genocides.’

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking – watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. There is, to be sure, a tragic view of modernity in which this is impossible: industrial society, powered by flaming carbon, contains the fuel of its own destruction. But the tragic view is incorrect. Ausubel notes that the modern world has been progressively decarbonizing.

Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It’s just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don’t have anything sentient in them. It’s like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren’t wet.