Steven Pinker

“People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.”

“Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes...”

“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, peopl...”

“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.”

“Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.”

“A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustain...”

“Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire econo...”

“'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.”

“Capitalism saved the world, and there is even a heretical theory now, moving up from the level of individuals to countries: countries that trade more and have more open economies are less li...”

“The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.”

“Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.”

“As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.”

“My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It i...”

“Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.”

“Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.”

“I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.”

“I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansio...”

“I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.”

“Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business.”

“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 here...”