Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The recent failure of democracy to take hold in many African and Islamic states is a reminder that a change in the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes… — steven pinker Copy Share Image
“The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism)… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” We can obsess not just over what we… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, “Life was better since the government came” because… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
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… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“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… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
