Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business. -Steven Pinker Strength
The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. -Steven Pinker Technology
Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality. -Steven Pinker Equality
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance. -Steven Pinker Chance
The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution. -Steven Pinker Nature
Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. -Steven Pinker Best
One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land. -Steven Pinker Learning
The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls. -Steven Pinker Religion
Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world. -Steven Pinker Knowledge
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. -Steven Pinker Society
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. -Steven Pinker Learning
Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. -Steven Pinker Technology
Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know. -Steven Pinker Knowledge
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. -Steven Pinker Technology
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. -Steven Pinker Failure
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. -Steven Pinker History
The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. -Steven Pinker Friendship
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. -Steven Pinker Chance
As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal. -Steven Pinker Learning
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. -Steven Pinker Equality
The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream. -Steven Pinker Nature
