Dan

“Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.”
― 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.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“[T]he nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature