Enlightenment Now Quotes

“harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits).”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. There is, to be sure, a tragic view of modernity in which this is impossible: industrial society, powered by flaming carbon, contains the fuel of its own destruction. But the tragic view is incorrect. Ausubel notes that the modern world has been progressively decarbonizing.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.47 In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Napoleon, that exponent of martial glory, sniffed at England as “a nation of shopkeepers.” But at the time Britons earned 83 percent more than Frenchmen and enjoyed a third more calories, and we all know what happened at Waterloo.15”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’—thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.10”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty. For every misfortune they seek a scapegoat. They see morality as a source of grounds for condemning rivals and mobilizing indignation against them.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And at the end of the day, the family dinner is alive and well. Several studies and polls agree that the number of dinners families have together changed little from 1960 through 2014, despite the iPhones, PlayStations, and Facebook accounts.23 Indeed, over the course of the 20th century, typical American parents spent more time, not less, with their children.24 In 1924, only 45 percent of mothers spent two or more hours a day with their children (7 percent spent no time with them), and only 60 percent of fathers spent at least an hour a day with them. By 1999, the proportions had risen to 71 and 83 percent.25 In fact, single and working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home married mothers did in 1965.26 (An increase in hours spent caring for children is the main reason for the dip in leisure time visible in figure 17-6.)27 But time-use studies are no match for Norman Rockwell and Leave It to Beaver, and many people misremember the mid-20th century as a golden age of family togetherness.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They're called women.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The beauty of reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history’s saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“It’s often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A dirty secret of the conservation movement is that wilderness preserves are set up only after indigenous peoples have been decimated or forcibly removed from them, including the national parks in the United States and the Serengeti in East Africa.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“It may be upsetting when someone says mean things on Twitter, but it is not the same as the slave trade or the Holocaust.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“(As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, “If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.”)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won’t punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Globalization in particular is a tide that is impossible for any ruler to order back. Many of a country’s problems are inherently global, including migration, pandemics, terrorism, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, rogue states, and the environment. Pretending they don’t exist is not tenable forever, and they can be solved only through international cooperation. Nor can the benefits of globalization—more affordable goods, larger markets for exports, the reduction in global poverty—be denied indefinitely. And with the Internet and inexpensive travel, there will be no stopping the flow of people and ideas (especially, as we will see, among younger people). As for the battle against truth and fact, over the long run they have a built-in advantage: when you stop believing in them, they don’t go away.
The deeper question is whether the rise of populist movements, whatever damage they do in the short term, represents the shape of things to come—whether, as a recent Boston Globe editorial lamented/gloated, “The Enlightenment had a good run.” Do the events around 2016 really imply that the world is headed back to the Middle Ages? As with climate change skeptics who claim to be vindicated by a nippy morning, it’s easy to overinterpret recent events.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In 1976,” Radelet writes, “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

“There are but three groups worthy of respect,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, “the priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress