By all measures men are the more violent gender.
Interpretation
Men tend to exhibit more violent behavior than women.
In this quote, Steven Pinker highlights the tendency for male individuals to engage in acts of violence more frequently than females. This observation touches upon the biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors that may influence violent behavior, suggesting that this pattern is deeply ingrained in human nature and society at large.
In practice
In a discussion on gender roles in society, this quote could be the centerpiece for explaining patterns of violence.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.
There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.
As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.
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