Enlightenment Now Quotes

“...los países más ricos y con una educación mejor tienden a ser menos religiosos.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“La irreligiosidad es una consecuencia natural de la riqueza y la educación.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The recoognition of a right to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure the rights are too tepid for a morally viable society.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The best way to understand an idea is to 'see what it is NOT' , so putting the alternatives to humanisation under the microscope can remind us what is at stake in advancing the ideals of the Enlightenment.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge; but that's the problem.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Una sociedad sin erudición histórica es como una persona sin memoria: engañada, confundida y fácilmente explotada.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Los regímenes revolucionarios, desde la Alemania nazi y la China maoísta hasta la Venezuela contemporánea, muestran que la gente tiene muchísimo que perder cuando los autoritarios carismáticos que responden a una -crisis- pisotean las normas y las instituciones democráticas y gobiernan sus países mediante la fuerza de sus personalidades.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“El populismo autoritario puede verse como la resistencia de ciertos elementos de la naturaleza humana -tribalismo, autoritarismo, demonización, pensamiento de suma cero- en contra de las instituciones ilustradas que fueron diseñadas para sortearlos.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“En un viejo chiste, un orador callejero se dirige a una multitud hablando sobre las glorias del comunismo: -¡Cuando llegue la revolución, todos comerán fresas con nata!- Desde la parte delantera, un hombre exclama: -Pero ¡a mí no me gustan las fresas con nata!-
El orador brama: -¡Cuando llegue la revolución, te gustarán las fresas con nata!”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“En la práctica, consumismo significa con frecuencia -consumo por parte de los demás-, pues las élites que lo condenan tienden a ser ellas mismas consumidoras conspicuas de lujos exorbitantes como libros de tapa dura, buena comida y buen vino, representaciones artísticas en directo, viajes al extranjero y educación en instituciones prestigiosas para sus hijos.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Los líderes -autoritarios- emplean los formidables recursos del Estado para hostigar a la oposición, crear falsos partidos opositores, utilizar los medios de comunicación controlados por el Estado para propagar relatos favorables, manipular las reglas electorales, inclinar los registros de votantes y manipular las propias elecciones.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Quienes condenan a las modernas sociedades capitalistas por su insensibilidad hacia los pobres probablemente ignoran lo poco que las sociedades precapitalistas del pasado invertían en el alivio de la pobreza.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Los ciudadanos de los países más ricos sienten más respeto por los valores "emancipatorios" o liberales tales como la igualdad de la mujer, la libertad de expresión, los derechos de los homosexuales, la democracia participativa y la protección del medio ambiente.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“El Dios de la Biblia hebrea, siempre misericordioso, dijo a la primera mujer: -Tantas haré tus fatigas cuantos sean tus embarazos: con dolor parirás los hijos-. Hasta hace poco tiempo, en torno a 1% de las madres morían en el parto; para una mujer estadounidense, estar embarazada hace un siglo era casi tan peligroso como tener cáncer de mama en la actualidad.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“La violencia se considera moral, no inmoral: por todo el mundo y a lo largo de toda la historia, se ha asesinado a más personas para imponer la justicia que para satisfacer la codicia.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Despair springs eternal. At least since the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, seers have warned their contemporaries about an imminent doomsday. Forecasts of End Times are a staple of psychics, mystics, televangelists, nut cults, founders of religions, and men pacing the sidewalk with sandwich boards saying “Repent!”9 The storyline that climaxes in harsh payback for technological hubris is an archetype of Western fiction, including Promethean fire, Pandora’s box, Icarus’s flight, Faust’s bargain, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein’s monster, and, from Hollywood, more than 250 end-of-the-world flicks.10 As the historian of science Eric Zencey has observed, “There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one’s actions, one’s very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The media and commentariat, for their part, could reflect on their own role in keeping the country’s anxiety at a boil. The trash barge story is emblematic of the media’s anxiogenic practices. Lost in the coverage at the time was the fact that the barge was forced on its peregrination not by a shortage of landfill space but by paperwork errors and the media frenzy itself.87 In the decades since, there have been few follow-ups that debunk misconceptions about a solid-waste crisis (the country actually has plenty of landfills, and they are environmentally sound).88 Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly 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

“A combination of Internet technology and crowdsourcing from thousands of volunteers has led to flabbergasting access to the great works of humankind. There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow. The answer does not depend on invidious comparisons of the quality of the works of today and those of the past (which we are in no position to make, just as many of the great works of the past were not appreciated in their time). It follows from our ceaseless creativity and our fantastically cumulative cultural memory. We have, at our fingertips, virtually all the works of genius prior to our time, together with those of our own time, whereas the people who lived before our time had neither. Better still, the world’s cultural patrimony is now available not just to the rich and well-located but to anyone who is connected to the vast web of knowledge, which means most of humanity and soon all of it.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical.2 To be aware of one’s country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern—such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated. They worry more about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether:”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Even experts repeat the lump fallacy, presumably out of rhetorical zeal rather than conceptual confusion. Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a talisman in the uproar over inequality, wrote, “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.”8 But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not “as poor.” A more damaging”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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 one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Public opinion researchers call it the Optimism Gap.3 For more than two decades, through good times and bad, when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.4 A large majority of Britons think that immigration, teen pregnancy, litter, unemployment, crime, vandalism, and drugs are a problem in the United Kingdom as a whole, while few think they are problems in their area.5 Environmental quality, too, is judged in most nations to be worse in the nation than in the community, and worse in the world than in the nation.6 In almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising.7 In late 2015, large majorities in eleven developed countries said that “the world is getting worse,” and in most of the last forty years a solid majority of Americans have said that the country is “heading in the wrong direction.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of political movements that depict their countries as being pulled into a hellish dystopia by malign factions that can be resisted only by a strong leader who wrenches the country backward to make it “great again.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false. There may be some subjectivists, perhaps styling themselves as pragmatists, who present subjectivism as applying even to itself. But then it does not call for a reply, since it is just a report of what the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say. If he also invites us to join him, we need not offer any reason for declining, since he has offered us no reason to accept.2”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress