The Comparative Risk of Terrorism ? essay from the Wall Street Journal:

It might be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to have a nuanced grasp of statistically based risk analysis, but there is nothing nuanced about two basic facts:

  1. America is a country of 310 million people, in which thousands of horrible things happen every single day; and
  2. The chances that one of those horrible things will be that you’re subjected to a terrorist attack can, for all practical purposes, be calculated as zero.

(via Bruce Schneier).