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"Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality-the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world."
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"Let each person decide his or her fate."
"Beauty, love with truth, that is all there is."
"The Judgement is not a question, it's a sure answer, as to a clump of dough, that will yeast and rise, or go in the oven and burn to crust."
"Can any man sacrifice is life for his fellow man?"
"I guess it's better to have a chalk smile, than an ink smile. Where chalk changes with the direction of wind, ink stays as a deep stain. Like rain, sun and hail against a fake plant."
"Minimalism means not trying to improve perfection."
"Life cannot be exchange for anything."
"Beauty is the brightness of being."
"The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish."
"Life is like a lit cigarette. The past is ashes, the present is burning, and the future is up in smoke. Fast as a breath; inhale exhale."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker
"Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned."
"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."
"As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully."
"Perhaps we should rejoice that people's emotions aren't designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one's group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That's why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group's, the outcomes are some of the history's worst atrocities."
"A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times."
"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."
"Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms."
"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?"
"Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world."
"The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun."
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