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Violence Quotes by Steven Pinker

48 Violence quotes by Steven Pinker

All Violence quotes Steven Pinker’s page

Pinker notes that societies that empower women tend to see less violence. He explains that the decline of violence is a long‑term pattern that varies across centuries and decades. He also points out that factors like technology, ideology, and culture shape how violence changes.

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“The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.”

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Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it…

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The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.

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As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.

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All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.

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Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

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“Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.”

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“A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.”

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If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or…

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“The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the…

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Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection,…

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“The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize…

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It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal…

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There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work…

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“The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with…

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“Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” We can obsess not just over what we…

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“One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed…

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“A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to…

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“People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of…

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People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have…

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“Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a…

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“Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition…

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“But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes…

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“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith,…

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Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory…

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“I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism)…

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“God, who is omnipotent, could have softened Pharaoh’s heart, but he hardens it instead, which gives him a reason to afflict every…

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“The 21st century has certainly seen the rape of women in wartime, but it has long been treated as an atrocious war…

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“The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were…

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“So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.”

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Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

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We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive…

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With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

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The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social…

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“The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast…

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For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an…

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“The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an…

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“The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who…

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Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate…

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Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you…

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In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award…

“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to…

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or…

“In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch.…

Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from…