Stephen Pinker

“Chomsky's writings are "classics" in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

“The general valorization of reason and evidence, scrutiny of social arrangements, open discourse and a reasonable scepticism have all been very healthy developments. The attempts to push them back —from both the right and the left wing and for different reasons, but denigrating secular reason, science, objectivity, free speech—I think bring dangers.”

“Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don’t need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.”