Enlightenment Now Quotes

“If the pie we were dividing in 1700 was baked in a standard nine-inch pan, then the one we have today would be more than ten feet in diameter.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Norberg, drawing on Braudel, offers vignettes of this era of misery, when the definition of poverty was simple: “if you could afford to buy bread to survive another day, you were not poor.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The claim that ethnic uniformity leads to cultural excellence is as wrong as an idea can be. There’s a reason we refer to unsophisticated things as provincial, parochial, and insular and to sophisticated ones as urbane and cosmopolitan. No one is brilliant enough to dream up anything of value all by himself. Individuals and cultures of genius are aggregators, appropriators, greatest-hit collectors. Vibrant cultures sit in vast catchment areas in which people and innovations flow from far and wide.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Eighty percent favored a law that would mandate labels on all foods “containing DNA.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If this trend continues, the 20th century should go down as the last during which tens of millions of people died for lack of access to food.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“On April 12, 1955, a team of scientists announced that Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio—the disease that had killed thousands a year, paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, and sent many children into iron lungs—was proven safe. According to Richard Carter’s history of the discovery, on that day “people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes, . . . took the rest of the day off, closed their schools or convoked fervid assemblies therein, drank toasts, hugged children, attended church, smiled at strangers, and forgave enemies.”4 The city of New York offered to honor Salk with a ticker-tape parade, which he politely declined.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Conversely, progress can be reversed by bad ideas, such as the conspiracy theory spread by the Taliban and Boko Haram that vaccines sterilize Muslim girls, or the one spread by affluent American activists that vaccines cause autism.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“But the most powerful contributor was science. “It is knowledge that is the key,” Deaton argues. “Income—although important both in and of itself and as a component of wellbeing . . .—is not the ultimate cause of wellbeing.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As impressive as the conquest of infectious disease in Europe and America was, the ongoing progress among the global poor is even more astonishing.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“However much one admires the improved views of the Boston waterfront, the lines of the stealth bomber, or the acting skills of Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, or indeed of the gorilla in King Kong, this still seems like a very good deal.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The eradication program cost about the same as producing five recent Hollywood blockbusters, or the wing of a B-2 bomber,”
― 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

“Ever-creative Homo sapiens had long fought back against disease with quackery such as prayer, sacrifice, bloodletting, cupping, toxic metals, homeopathy, and squeezing a hen to death against an infected body part.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“people today live far more years in the pink of health than their ancestors lived altogether, healthy and infirm years combined”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And no, the extra years of life will not be spent senile in a rocking chair. Of course the longer you live, the more of those years you’ll live as an older person, with its inevitable aches and pains. But bodies that are better at resisting a mortal blow are also better at resisting the lesser assaults of disease, injury, and wear.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“No matter how old you are, you have more years ahead of you than people of your age did in earlier decades and centuries.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Most hunter-gatherer tribes have plenty of people in their seventies and even some in their eighties. Though a Hadza woman’s life expectancy at birth is 32.5 years, if she makes it to 45 she can expect to live another 21 years.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“for an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The God of the Hebrew Bible, ever merciful, told the first woman, “I will multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Imagine the tragedy; then try to imagine it another million times. 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

“Yes, well into the 19th century, in Sweden, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, between a quarter and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday, and in some years the death toll was close to half.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013,” Norberg writes. “After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“we tend to think that “we approach death by one year for every year we age, but during the twentieth century, the average person approached death by just seven months for every year they aged.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bien-pensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class—the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don’t want to believe them!”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“No sooner did people step into the light than they were advised that darkness wasn’t so bad after all, that they should stop daring to understand so much, that dogmas and formulas deserved another chance, and that human nature’s destiny was not progress but decline.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“I am a superman: hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress