Quotessence
Home / Books / The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Book by Steven Pinker · 31 quotes · Violence, Reason, People

Filter quotes by topic

AllViolenceReasonPeopleReligionWorldForceHumansMenCultureDoeFactsHistoryIllusionLeftPerspectiveRegulationSkepticismTheoryTodayValues

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Quotes

“For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.”

WorldMadeForceOur LivesViolenceTroubleCivilizationEnlightenmentMade ItAccomplishmentCherishDeclineTribulationImpetus
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.”

WorldBookCultureOpportunityGamesWrittenParticularPerspectiveMoralityConsequenceCustomsRegulationTribesArbitraryDeitiesVengeful
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason”

PeopleSoulReasonFactsEarthReligionValuesSoundExistenceMoralDoctrineUpliftingTemporaryPhasesSkepticismFractionsReplacementsDiscountsMoral ValuesSacredness
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create 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 has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.”

FeelsLittlesHas BeensSelfProblemKidsSchoolPastFormForceToo MuchViolenceCenturySelf EsteemTheoryLateLowsProgramTasksExtraordinaryInspiredEsteemCaliforniaExpertsDelusionQuartersDozenFeel BetterLegislatureLow Self EsteemProminentTask Forces
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”

PeopleWayMeanLongDoeReasonRunningPassionIndividualCommunityPerfectFoolExerciseCapableIllusionRationalConclusionFacultyLong RunsSounder
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“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.”

ShouldChildrenReasonLawLife IsPoliticsLeftSocialViewsProtectAdultsPolicePoint Of ViewVulnerableReason WhyRegulationLazinessConsideringWorkplaceNormLife Is LikeSocial NormsCallousness
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.”

DifferentCharacterReligionNamesLeftHalfModernStyleContradictionConceptionScholarBiblicalEditingMillenniumDialectDifferent StylesHaphazardDuplication
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond.”

BibleModernismSavagery
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.”

GodReligionViolenceScriptureWomen S RightsGay Rights
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?”

ReasonSciencePurposeFamilyTraditionHuman RaceIndividualismModernityTribeCosmopolitan
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of others. It is reason too that can always take note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning, and update and improve itself in response. And if you detect a flaw in this argument, it is reason that allows you to point it out and defend an alternative.”

Reason
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“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, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline.”

HistoryViolenceColonial
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.”

HumansFaithViolenceThought Provoking
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“Lewis Richardson wrote that his quest to analyze peace with numbers sprang from two prejudices. As a Quaker, he believed that "the moral evil in war outweighs the moral good, although the latter is conspicuous." As a scientist, he thought there was too much moralizing about war and not enough knowledge. "For indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it. If the reader should object that I have abandoned ethics for the false doctrine that 'tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner' [to understand all is to forgive all], I can reply that it is only a temporary suspense of ethical judgment, made because 'beaucoup condamner c'est peu comprendre' [to condemn much is to understand little]." (p. 200)”

EthicsIndignationMoralizingCondemnRichardson
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image

“It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die. Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias. The numbers confirm the impressions.”

Violence Peace
Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Create image