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The abolitionist elites in Europe got their way over the misgivings of the common man because European democracies did not convert the opinions of the common man into policy. The penal codes of their countries were drafted by committees of renowned scholars, passed into law by legislators who thought of themselves as a natural aristocracy, and implemented by appointed judges who were lifelong civil servants. It was only after a couple of decades had elapsed and people saw that their country had not fallen into chaos—at which point it would have taken a concerted effort to reintroduce capital punishment—that the populace came around to seeing it as unnecessary.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing (such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Many political scientists have concluded that most people correctly recognize that their votes are astronomically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and so they prioritize work, family, and leisure over educating themselves about politics and calibrating their votes. They use the franchise as a form of self-expression: they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for their kind of people.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts, such as what the major branches of government are, who the United States fought in World War II, and which countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded: they say that the government spends too much on “welfare” but too little on “assistance to the poor,” and that it should “use military force” but not “go to war.” When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. But it hardly matters, because once in office politicians vote the positions of their party regardless of the opinions of their constituents.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Political scientists are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs, and by the tenuous connection of their preferences to their votes and to the behavior of their representatives.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. Modern terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

even with the double counting of terrorism and war during the 21st century’s worst year for war deaths, a global citizen was 11 times as likely to have died in a homicide as in a terrorist attack, more than 30 times as likely to have died in a car crash, and more than 125 times as likely to have died in an accident of any kind.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

in 2015 an American was more than 350 times as likely to be killed in a police-blotter homicide as in a terrorist attack, 800 times as likely to be killed in a car crash, and 3,000 times as likely to die in an accident of any kind. (Among the categories of accident that typically kill more than 44 people in a given year are “Lightning,” “Contact with hot tap water,” “Contact with hornets, wasps, and bees,” “Bitten or struck by mammals other than dogs,” “Drowning and submersion while in or falling into bathtub,” and “Ignition or melting of clothing and apparel other than nightwear.”)

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

With the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, many social critics have expressed nostalgia for the era of factories, mines, and mills, probably because they never worked in one.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Also noteworthy is that opioid overdoses are largely an epidemic of the druggy Baby Boomer cohort reaching middle age. The peak age of poisoning deaths in 2011 was around fifty, up from the low forties in 2003, the late thirties in 1993, the early thirties in 1983, and the early twenties in 1973.57 Do the subtractions and you find that in every decade it’s the members of the generation born between 1953 and 1963 who are drugging themselves to death.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Whenever a government brings a frontier region under the rule of law and its people become integrated into a commercial society, rates of violence fall.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The prevalence of conscription, the size of armed forces, and the level of global military spending as a percentage of GDP have all decreased in recent decades.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The political scientist Joshua Goldstein notes that today’s four million Syrian refugees are outnumbered by the ten million displaced by the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971, the fourteen million displaced by the partition of India in 1947, and the sixty million displaced by World War II in Europe alone, eras when the world’s population was a fraction of what it is now.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peru, as in Colombia, leftist guerrillas battled American-backed governments, and in Nicaragua it was the other way around (American-backed contras battling a left-wing government), in conflicts that collectively killed more than 650,000 people.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

It’s often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker