"If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of t...

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 ~












So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of bei...
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More Steven Pinker quotes
"Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.
"Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
"Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.
"We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
"The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and ...
"Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history o...
"The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal sys...
"In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could thin...
"One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, th...
"In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander th...
"The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used ...
"The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doub...
"Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power ...
"As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, “Life was better since the government came” because “a man could now eat witho...