Steven Pinker

A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?

Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.

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 the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

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.

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?

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

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.

Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

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

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.

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.

If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

By all measures men are the more violent gender.

All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.