People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.Steven Pinker
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.Steven Pinker
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.Steven Pinker
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.Steven Pinker
Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.Steven Pinker
You don't like to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin of life or the fate of the planet?Steven Pinker
Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.Steven Pinker
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.Steven Pinker
