Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.

Steven Pinker

It is the very nature of argument to stake a claim to being right.

Steven Pinker

Think of it this way: The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.

Steven Pinker

Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.

Steven Pinker

The American poverty rate has decline by ninety percent since 1960, from 30 percent of the population to just 3 percent.

Steven Pinker

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to greed.

Steven Pinker

A typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910.

Steven Pinker

In many surveys it turns out that every student, questioned privately, thinks that binge drinking is a terrible idea, but each is convinced that his peers think it's cool.

Steven Pinker

Today's conservatives are more liberal than yesterday's liberals.

Steven Pinker

Humans can thrive on a modern vegetarian diet and animals' interests in a life free of pain and premature death surely outweigh the marginal increase in pleasure we get from eating their flesh.

Steven Pinker

Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong

Steven Pinker

In 1987 only half of Americans thought it was always wrong for a man to strike his wife with a belt or stick.

Steven Pinker

The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, replied, 'No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.'

Steven Pinker

No two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war.

Steven Pinker

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

James Madison

We find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

Steven Pinker

Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident or disease.

Steven Pinker