Enlightenment Now Quotes

“As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially.7 That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Most obviously, GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.57 Less obviously, it correlates with higher ethical values like peace, freedom, human rights, and tolerance.58”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The sin of ingratitude may not have made the Top Seven, but according to Dante it consigns the sinners to the ninth circle of Hell, and that’s where post-1960s intellectual culture may find itself because of its amnesia for the conquerors of disease.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The ideal of progress also should not be confused with the 20th-century movement to re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners, which the political scientist James Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism.14 The movement denied the existence of human nature, with its messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition, and social intimacy.15”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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

“A recent one entitled “Is There an Epidemic of Child or Adolescent Depression?” vindicated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As the decades pass, depressed people are more likely to die of suicide and other causes, so the old people who remain in a sample are the mentally healthier ones, making it seem as if everyone who was born long ago is mentally healthier.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Historical data are scarce, not least because suicide, also called “self-murder,” used to be a crime in many countries, including England until 1961.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now. —Barack Obama, 2016”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The San of the Kalahari, once called “the original affluent society,” turn out to work at least eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, on food alone.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” said the ever-merciful God as he exiled Adam and Eve from Eden, and for most people throughout history, sweat they did.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“they say that the government spends too much on “welfare” but too little on “assistance to the poor,” and that it should “use military force” but not “go to war.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word “democratic” in its official name, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn’t one.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When robotic cars are ubiquitous, they could save more than a million lives a year, becoming one of the greatest gifts to human life since the invention of antibiotics.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The inventor of the highway guard rail did not get a Nobel Prize, nor are humanitarian awards given to designers of clearer prescription drug labels.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“While a vision of world peace may have given John and Yoko some good songs, it is hopelessly naïve in the real world.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“It’s often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The other two famous accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one. Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of which make headlines.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of extraordinary Soviet-era bungling, together with a few thousand early deaths from cancer above the 100,000 natural cancer deaths in the exposed population.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The energy analyst Robert Bryce estimates that simply keeping up with the world’s increase in energy use would require turning an area the size of Germany into wind farms every year.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the poor are probably unaware of how little the pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Scheidel concludes, “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the richest country two centuries ago (the Netherlands), life expectancy was just forty, and in no country was it above forty-five. Today, life expectancy in the poorest country in the world (the Central African Republic) is fifty-four, and in no country is it below forty-five.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“According to one estimate, every cell phone adds $3,000 to the annual GDP of a developing country.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“We live in a world not just with a smaller proportion of extremely poor people but with a smaller number of them, and with 6.6 billion people who are not extremely poor.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“how low it has sunk—to 10 percent. In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress