Enlightenment Now Quotes

“Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the testing of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Unfortunately the epistemological standards of common sense—we should credit the people and ideas that make correct predictions, and discount the ones that don’t—are rarely applied to the intelligentsia and commentariat, who dispense opinions free of accountability.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power.”
― 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. You care about yourself, and you have a responsibility to respect the laws of the universe that keep you alive, so you don’t squander your existence. Your loved ones care about you, and you have a responsibility not to orphan your children, widow your spouse, and shatter your parents. And anyone with a humanistic sensibility cares about you, not in the sense of feeling your pain—human empathy is too feeble to spread itself across billions of strangers—but in the sense of realizing that your existence is cosmically no less important than theirs, and that we all have a responsibility to use the laws of the universe to enhance the conditions in which we all can flourish.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“After all, in the absence of electoral reform the richest donors can get the ear of politicians whether they earn 2 percent of national income or 8 percent of it.20”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening: people in the more unequal societies are happier. The authors suggest that whatever envy, status anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world needs less than a third of the land it used to need to produce a given amount of food.23 Another way of stating the bounty is that between 1961 and 2009 the amount of land used to grow food increased by 12 percent, but the amount of food that was grown increased by 300 percent.24 In addition to beating back hunger, the ability to grow more food from less land has been, on the whole, good for the planet.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the United States in 1901, an hour’s wages could buy around three quarts of milk; a century later, the same wages would buy sixteen quarts.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In 1909 Carl Bosch perfected a process invented by Fritz Haber which used methane and steam to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer on an industrial scale, replacing the massive quantities of bird poop that had previously been needed to return nitrogen to depleted soils. Those two chemists top the list of the 20th-century scientists who saved the greatest number of lives in history, with 2.7 billion.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When a “nation” is conceived as a tacit social contract among people sharing a territory, like a condominium association, it is an essential means for advancing its members’ flourishing. And of course it is genuinely admirable for one individual to sacrifice his or her interests for those of many individuals.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If you ignore all the years in which an indicator of some problem declines, and report every uptick (since, after all, it’s “news”), readers will come away with the impression that life is getting worse and worse even as it gets better and better. In the first six months of 2016 the New York Times pulled this trick three times, with figures for suicide, longevity, and automobile fatalities.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”6”
― 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. . . . One consequence is that many Americans today have difficulty imagining, valuing or even believing in the promise of incremental system change, which leads to a greater appetite for revolutionary, smash-the-machine change.30”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“in which I argued that human beings are fitted by evolution with a number of destructive motives such as greed, lust, dominance, vengeance, and self-deception.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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”
― 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

“The problem with dystopian rhetoric is that if people believe that the country is a flaming dumpster, they will be receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: “What do you have to lose?” If the media and intellectuals instead put events into statistical and historical context, they could help answer that question.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We can see happiness as the output of an ancient biological feedback system that tracks our progress in pursuing auspicious signs of fitness in a natural environment. We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them. Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.13 For all these reasons, the growth of education—and its first dividend, literacy—is a flagship of human progress.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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

“I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Which policies will in fact bring about things that almost everyone wants, like lasting peace or economic growth? Which will reduce poverty, or violent crime, or illiteracy? A rational society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“One technique was discovered long ago by rabbis: they forced yeshiva students to switch sides in a Talmudic debate and argue the opposite position. Another is to have people try to reach a consensus in a small discussion group; this forces them to defend their opinions to their groupmates, and the truth usually wins.89 Scientists themselves have hit upon a new strategy called adversarial collaboration, in which mortal enemies work together to get to the bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree beforehand will settle it.90”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress