A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

— 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

A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.

— Steven Pinker

Also, even if technocrats provide reasonable estimates of a risk, which itself is an iffy enterprise, they cannot dictate what level of risk people ought to accept. People might object to a nuclear power plant that has a minuscule risk of a meltdown not because they overestimate the risk, but because they feel that the cost of a catastrophe, no matter how remote, are too dreadful. And of course any of these trade-offs may be unacceptable if people perceive that the benefits would go to the wealthy and powerful while they themselves absorb the risks. Nonetheless, understanding the difference between our best science and our ancient ways of thinking can only make our individual and collective decisions better informed. It can help scientists and journalists explain a new technology in the face of the most common misunderstandings. And it can help all of us understand the technology so that we can accept or reject it on grounds that we can justify to ourselves and to others.

— Steven Pinker

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliché of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

— Steven Pinker

And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-fiddle and not fiddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and pitter-patter? Why ribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can't a kitchen be spanned and spic? Whence riffraff, mishmash, flimflam, chit-chat, tit-for-tat, knick-knack, zigzag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, crisscross, hilly-shally, see-saw, heehaw, flip-flop, hip pity-hop, ticktock, tic-tac-toe, deny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, click-clack, hickory-hickory-dock, kit and caboodle, and Babbitt-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back.

— Steven Pinker

An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

— Steven Pinker

Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. That means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by.

— Steven Pinker

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

— Steven Pinker

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

— Steven Pinker