June

“Even when we have an inkling that we are speaking in a specialized lingo, we may be reluctant to slip back into plain speech. It could betray to our peers the awful truth that we are still greenhorns, tenderfoots, newbies. And if our readers do know the lingo, we might be insulting their intelligence by spelling it out. We would rather run the risk of confusing them while at least appearing to be sophisticated than take a chance at belaboring the obvious while striking them as naïve or condescending.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an explanation of why specialists use so much idiosyncratic terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and zombie nouns. They are not trying to bamboozle us; that’s just the way they think.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist, and if I were indifferent to the baby’s suffering, her crying would be nothing more than an annoyance.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“The combination of close personal relationships, coupled with threats of punishment, is the standard Chinese modus operandi. Beijing hoped to turn Australia into a ‘second France’, ‘a western country that would dare to say “no” to America’.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia