We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.

— Steven Pinker

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

— Steven Pinker

We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.

— Steven Pinker

We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.

— Steven Pinker

What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?

— Steven Pinker

What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.

— Steven Pinker

When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

— Steven Pinker

When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of interacting applies to a current relationship, the result can range from blank incomprehension to acute discomfort or outright hostility. Think abut a dinner guest offering to pay the host for her meal, a person barking an order to a friend, or an employee helping himself to a shrimp off the boss' plate. Misunderstandings in which one person thinks of a transaction in terms of Equality Matching and another thinks in terms of Market Pricing are even more pervasive and can be even more dangerous. They tap into very different psychologies, one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned, and clashes between them have been common in economic history.

— Steven Pinker

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of razzle-dazzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harm-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, fully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, NIMBY-pamby, mumbo jumbo, Luisa-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razzmatazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruct"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruct consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruct consonant. Why ask why?

— Steven Pinker

Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positron brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

— Steven Pinker