Enlightenment Now Quotes

“Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Nationalism should not be confused with civic values, public spirit, social responsibility, or cultural pride.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Religion, too, has defenders on both halves of the political spectrum. Even writers who are unwilling to defend the literal content of religious beliefs may be fiercely defensive of religion and hostile to the idea that science and reason have anything to say about morality (most of them show little awareness that humanism even exists). Defenders of the faith insist that religion has the exclusive franchise for questions about what matters. Or that even if we sophisticated people don't need religion to be moral, the teeming masses do. Or that even if everyone would be better off without religious faith, it's pointless to talk about the place of religion in the world because religion is a part of human nature, which is why, mocking Enlightenment hopes, it is more tenacious than ever.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The most obvious add-on is supernatural enforcement: the belief that if one commits a sin, one will be smitten by God, damned to hell, or inscribed on the wrong page of the Book of Life. It’s a tempting add-on because secular law enforcement cannot possibly detect and punish every infraction, and everyone has a motive to convince everyone else that they cannot get away with murder.31 As with Santa Claus, he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In fact, war may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome, like pestilence, hunger, and poverty.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Chris Rock observed, “This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. 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

“The application of reason revealed that reports of miracles were dubious, that the authors of holy books were all too human, that natural events unfolded with no regard to human welfare, and that different cultures believed in mutually incompatible deities, none of them less likely than the others to be products of the imagination. (As Montesquieu wrote, “If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.”)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“One exception to the Negativity bias is found in autobiographical memory. Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us.24 We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds. Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain’t what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.25”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The results suggest that many of the things that make people happy also make their lives meaningful, such as being connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored.”
― 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. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth. Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain.54”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Yes, people are vulnerable to cognitive illusions that lead to supernatural beliefs, and they certainly need to belong to a community. Over the course of history, institutions have arisen that offer packages of customs that encourage those illusions and cater to those needs. That does not imply that people need the complete packages, any more than the existence of sexual desire implies that people need Playboy clubs. As societies become more educated and secure, the components of the legacy religious institutions can be unbundled. The art, rituals, iconography,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though the role of theistic morality in the problems besetting the Islamic world is inescapable, many Western intellectuals—who would be appalled if the repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in the Islamic world were found in their own societies even diluted a hundredfold—have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the name of Islam.101 Some of the apologetics, to be sure, come from an admirable desire to prevent prejudice against Muslims. Some are intended to discredit a destructive (and possibly self-fulfilling) narrative that the world is embroiled in a clash of civilizations. Some fit into a long history of Western intellectuals execrating their own society and romanticizing its enemies (a syndrome we’ll return to shortly). But many of the apologetics come from a soft spot for religion among theists, faitheists, and Second Culture intellectuals, and a reluctance to go all in for Enlightenment humanism.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Anyone can say that rocks fall down rather than up, but only a person who is truly committed to the brethren has a reason to say that God is three persons but also one person, or that the Democratic Party ran a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”30”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.3”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule?” (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence. The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune maybe no one’s fault.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47”
― 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. And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When I read things like, “The foundations of capitalism are shattering,” I’m like, maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. . . . ’Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. . . . Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. . . . They’re like, “It was the worst day of my life. . . . We get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.” . . . Oh really, then what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they fuckin’ put air in them? . . . You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now! . . . People say there’s delays? . . . Air travel’s too slow? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years! And a bunch of you would die on the way there, and you’d get shot in the neck with an arrow, and the other passengers would just bury you and put a stick there with your hat on it and keep walking. . . . The Wright Brothers would kick us all in the [crotch] if they knew.1”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress