Enlightenment Now Quotes

“authoritarian populism.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005.”43 (The same observation has been made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“I’ve seen the answer: some of them figure, “If that’s what science is, I might as well make money!” Four years later their brainpower is applied to thinking up algorithms that allow hedge funds to act on financial information a few milliseconds faster rather than to finding new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease or technologies for carbon capture and storage.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on. But this strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines, and the statement gave no indication that we might have good reasons to prefer understanding and know-how to ignorance and superstition”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The most decisive repudiation of eugenics invokes classical liberal and libertarian principles: government is not an omnipotent ruler over human existence but an institution with circumscribed powers, and perfecting the genetic makeup of the species is not among them.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the nature of forecasting, he said, “When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“the theory of the hedonic treadmill,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The major enemy of reason in the public sphere today—which is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization—appears to be on an upswing.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“What is surprising, though, is that in every part of the world, people have become more liberal. A lot more liberal: young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s. Though in every culture both the zeitgeist and the generations became more liberal, in some, like the Islamic Middle East, the liberalization was driven mainly by the generational turnover, and it played an obvious role in the Arab Spring.41”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“For those who need data to be convinced, in global surveys of values in which every variable that social scientists like to measure is thrown into the pot (including income, education, and dependence on oil revenues), Islam itself predicts an extra dose of patriarchal and other illiberal values across countries and individuals.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Some of the regressive customs found in Muslim-majority countries, such as female genital mutilation and “honor killings” of unchaste sisters and daughters, are ancient African or West Asian tribal practices and are misattributed by their perpetrators to Islamic law. Some”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Islamic civilization had a precocious scientific revolution, and for much of its history was more tolerant, cosmopolitan, and internally peaceful than the Christian West.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.85”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A “spirituality” that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“What about a more abstract sense of “spirituality”? If it consists in gratitude for one’s existence, awe at the beauty and immensity of the universe, and humility before the frontiers of human understanding, then spirituality is indeed an experience that makes life worth living—and one that is lifted into higher dimensions by the revelations of science and philosophy.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Sympathy among kin emerges from the overlap in genetic makeup that interconnects us in the great web of life. Sympathy among everyone else emerges from the impartiality of nature: each of us may find ourselves in straits where a small mercy from another grants a big boost in our own welfare,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Evidence-free pronouncements about the misery of mankind are an occupational hazard of the social critic. In the 1854 classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And there are so many reasons to live! As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy—the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness—and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues. And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“l’esprit de l’escalier,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems, holding geography, history, and culture constant.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Market economies, in addition to reaping the benefits of specialization and providing incentives for people to produce things that other people want, solve the problem of coordinating the efforts of hundreds of millions of people by using prices to propagate information about need and availability far and wide, a computational problem that no planner is brilliant enough to solve from a central bureau.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The first is the decline of communism (together with intrusive socialism). For reasons we have seen, market economies can generate wealth prodigiously while totalitarian planned economies impose scarcity, stagnation, and often famine.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.5 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

“We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“changes that take place on the time scale of journalism will always show ups and downs.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And tellingly, the number of libertarian paradises in the world—developed countries without substantial social spending—is zero.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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. With the right rules, a community of less than fully rational thinkers can cultivate rational thoughts.31”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress