Steven Pinker

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

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

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.

People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.

Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.