Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.Steven Pinker
With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.Steven Pinker
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
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
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.Steven Pinker
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
Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.Steven Pinker
If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.Steven Pinker
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
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.Steven Pinker
