All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the idea that unreported peaceful interactions are overlooked in media narratives focused on violence.
Steven Pinker's quote suggests that the majority of human interactions are peaceful and non-violent, yet these events are rarely highlighted in news coverage. Instead, the media often focuses on sensational violence, skewing public perception and leading to a misunderstanding of the inherent nature of human behavior. By acknowledging the violence that does not occur, we can cultivate a more nuanced understanding of society and emphasize the importance of peace.
In practice
In a speech addressing community safety, this quote could be used to emphasize the importance of recognizing non-violent solutions.
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.
We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
You can't have capitalism without racism.
Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.
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