“We need books that work on us like misfortune (Unglück), that hurt us like the death of one who is dearer to us than ourselves, as if we were exiled into the woods far from all humans, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief” (Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904).

— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

…in most years between 1992 and 2015, an era that criminologists call the Great American Crime Decline, a majority of Americans believed that crime was rising.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

testimony of a Dutch merchant who was in India during a famine in 1630–31:
“Men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly. It was easy to recognize their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty. . . . One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery.” The familiar human dramas followed: wives and children abandoned, children sold by parents, who either abandoned them or sold themselves in order to survive, collective suicides. . . . Then came the stage when the starving split open the stomachs of the dead or dying and “drew at the entrails to fill their own bellies.” “Many hundred thousands of men died of hunger, so that the whole country was covered with corpses lying unburied, which caused such a stench that the whole air was filled and infected with it. . . . In the village of Susuntra . . . human flesh was sold in open market.”

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Nothing could be better for a new technology than a few years of being used only by a small number of early adopters.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Several climate activists have lamented that by writing and starring in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore may have done the movement more harm than good, because as a former Democratic vice-president and presidential nominee he stamped climate change with a left-wing seal.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now