Enlightenment Now Quotes

“Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In many colleges and universities, science is presented not as the pursuit of true explanations but as just another narrative or myth. Science is commonly blamed for racism, imperialism, world wars, and the Holocaust. And it is accused of robbing life of its enchantment and stripping humans of freedom and dignity.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Many intellectuals and critics express a disdain for science as anything but a fix for mundane problems. They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good. Their methodology for seeking the truth consists not in framing hypotheses and citing evidence but in issuing pronouncements that draw on their breadth of erudition”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease, feeding the hungry, saving the lives of infants and mothers, and allowing women to control their fertility.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets. Not coincidentally, these were the major brainchildren of the Enlightenment”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Communities can thereby come up with rules that allow true beliefs to emerge from the rough-and-tumble of argument, such as that you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you’re allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you’re not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you. Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Enlightenment thinkers were men and women of their age, the 18th century. Some were racists, sexists, anti-Semites, slaveholders, or duelists. Some of the questions they worried about are almost incomprehensible to us, and they came up with plenty of daffy ideas together with the brilliant ones. More to the point, they were born too soon to appreciate some of the keystones of our modern understanding of reality.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Enlightenment thinkers were men and women of their age, the 18th century. Some were racists, sexists, anti-Semites, slaveholders, or duelists. Some of the questions they worried about are almost incomprehensible to us, and they came up with plenty of daffy ideas together with the brilliant ones. More to the point, they were born too soon to appreciate some of the keystones”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In an old academic joke, a dean is presiding over a faculty meeting when a genie appears and offers him one of three wishes—money, fame, or wisdom. The dean replies, “That’s easy. I’m a scholar. I’ve devoted my life to understanding. Of course I’ll take wisdom.” The genie waves his hand and vanishes in a puff of smoke. The smoke clears to reveal the dean with his head in his hands, lost in thought. A minute elapses. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Finally a professor calls out, “Well? Well?” The dean mutters, “I should have taken the money.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don’t matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.42”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause. In”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The next step in the historic trend toward greater social spending may be a universal basic income (or its close relative, a negative income tax). The idea has been bruited for decades, and its day may be coming.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The middle class is being hollowed out in part because so many Americans are becoming affluent. Inequality undoubtedly increased—the rich got richer faster than the poor and middle class got richer—but everyone (on average) got richer.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The pattern remains—globalization helped the lower and middle classes of poor countries, and the upper class of rich countries, much more than it helped the lower middle class of rich countries—but the differences are less extreme.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Once the secrets to growing food in abundance are unlocked and the infrastructure to move it around is in place, the decline of famine depends on the decline of poverty, war, and autocracy.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The African AIDS dip is a reminder that progress is not an escalator that inexorably raises the well-being of every human everywhere all the time.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“the same time, the mental health professions, and perhaps the culture at large, has been lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong—wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn’t-be-more-wrong.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Suicides are often hard to distinguish from accidents (particularly when the cause is a poisoning or drug overdose, but also when it is a fall, a car crash, or a gunshot), and coroners may tilt their classifications in times and places in which suicide is stigmatized or criminalized.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don't confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Also, people single out freedom as a component of a meaningful life, whether or not it leads to a happy life.11 Like Frank Sinatra, they may have regrets, they may take blows, but they do it their way.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We have been spiritually impoverished, they say, by the rise of individualism, materialism, consumerism, and decadent wealth, and by the erosion of traditional communities with their hearty social bonds and their sense of meaning and purpose bestowed by religion.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“and Twitter hashtag #firstworldproblems and in a monologue by the comedian Louis C.K. known as “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy”:”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“But if popular impressions are a guide, today’s Americans are not one and a half times happier (as they would be if happiness tracked income), or a third happier (if it tracked education), or even an eighth happier (if it tracked longevity).”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress