Enlightenment Now Quotes

“Graphs like figure 5-2 display a triumph of human well-being whose magnitude the mind cannot begin to comprehend.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“That’s a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The average would have been longer still were it not for the calamity of AIDS, which caused the terrible trough in the 1990s before antiretroviral drugs started to bring it under control.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Max Roser’s Our World in Data, Marian Tupy’s HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“For decades, journalism’s steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump’s seeds of discontent and despair to take root. . .”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Since any defense of reason, science, and humanism would count for nothing if, two hundred and fifty years after the Enlightenment, we’re no better off than our ancestors in the Dark Ages, an appraisal of human progress is where the case must begin.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“After noting Snow’s “utter lack of intellectual distinction and . . . embarrassing vulgarity of style,” Leavis scoffed at a value system in which “‘standard of living’ is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Nor is it sweet and right to clasp death in order to prevent a province from seceding, expand a sphere of influence, or carry out an irredentist crusade”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We see the clash between nationalism and humanism in morbid patriotic slogans like “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (Sweet and right it is to die for your country) and “Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Far from sprouting from the grass roots or channeling the anger of know-nothings, the disdain for reason, science, humanism, and progress has a long pedigree in elite intellectual and artistic culture.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“To appreciate this burden, one doesn’t have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“(Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I’ll turn to in the final chapter.)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If the system is wired so that it triggers actions that typically reduce the difference between the current state and the goal state, it can be said to pursue goals (and when the world is sufficiently predictable, it will attain them).”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The sequence of bases in a DNA molecule correlates with the sequence of amino acids in the proteins that make up the organism’s body, and they got that sequence by structuring the organism’s ancestors—reducing their entropy—into the improbable configurations that allowed them to capture energy and grow and reproduce.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The information contained in a pattern depends on how coarsely or finely grained our view of the world is.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When energy is poured into a system, and the system dissipates that energy in its slide toward entropy, it can become poised in an orderly, indeed beautiful, configuration—a sphere, spiral, starburst, whirlpool, ripple, crystal, or fractal.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Still, the appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress always has to be made. When we fail to acknowledge our hard-won progress, we may come to believe that perfect order and universal prosperity are the natural state of affairs, and that every problem is an outrage that calls for blaming evildoers, wrecking institutions, and empowering a leader who will restore the country to its rightful greatness. I have made my own best case for progress and the ideals that made it possible, and have dropped hints on how journalists, intellectuals, and other thoughtful people (including the readers of this book) might avoid contributing to the widespread heedlessness of the gifts of the Enlightenment. Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too. 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

“(As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, “If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.”) Many Enlightenment thinkers, including Montesquieu, Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, endorsed the ideal of doux commerce, gentle commerce.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“(As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, “If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.”) Many Enlightenment thinkers, including Montesquieu, Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, endorsed the ideal”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As the most famous product of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, put it, in order to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In this way of thinking, government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for “society,” or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Rather than trying to shape human nature, the Enlightenment hope for progress was concentrated on human institutions. Human-made systems like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary in a way that is hard to appreciate today, now that its discoveries have become second nature to most of us. The historian David Wootton reminds us of the understanding of an educated Englishman on the eve of the Revolution in 1600: He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea. . . . He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be any in England—he knows they are to be found in Belgium. . . . He believes Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians. . . . He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a unicorn. He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7 A century and a third later, an educated descendant of this Englishman would believe none of these things. It was an escape not just from ignorance but from terror. The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in the Middle Ages “the belief that an external force controlled daily life contributed to a kind of collective paranoia”: Rainstorms, thunder, lightning, wind gusts, solar or lunar eclipses, cold snaps, heat waves, dry spells, and earthquakes alike were considered signs and signals of God’s displeasure. As a result, the “hobgoblins of fear” inhabited every realm of life. The sea became a satanic realm, and forests were populated with beasts of prey, ogres, witches, demons, and very real thieves and cutthroats. . . . After dark, too, the world was filled with omens portending dangers of every sort: comets, meteors, shooting stars, lunar eclipses, the howls of wild animals.8 To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. That knowledge includes an understanding of ourselves.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us. We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“...cuando las personas aumentan su curiosidad intelectual y su cultura científica, dejan de creer en milagros.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress