Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.
Interpretation
Democracy attempts to balance society's extremes, minimizing violence while preventing anarchy and tyranny.
Steven Pinker highlights democracy's inherent imperfections, portraying it as a system that navigates between the dangers of anarchy—where chaos reigns unchecked—and tyranny, where oppressive rule prevails. He suggests that while democracy isn't flawless, it strives to minimize violence, presenting it as the most humane way to structure governance, keeping the peace without resorting to forceful extremes.
In practice
This quote could be used in a political debate to emphasize the value of democratic systems.
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.
Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.
I don't think the Egyptian people want to see what is a very clear effort to obtain political and economic rights turn into any kind of new form of oppression or suppression or violence or letting loose criminal elements.
The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Saddam can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer.
If you're going to have any kind of political opposition in the 21st century, then it has to be as fundamentally liquid as the rapidly changing society we're living in.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.