Enlightenment Now Quotes

“Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable—who could be against human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that does not come naturally to the human mind.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Some are products of the misconception that the benefits of democracy come from elections, whereas they depend more on having a government that is constrained in its powers, responsive to its citizens, and attentive to the results of its policies (chapter”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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

“Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn’t seek them, there would be no people.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language. It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry:

Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor.

Yes, "smallpox was.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The graph, unsurprisingly, reveals that differences across the world’s culture zones are substantial. The Protestant countries of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal, followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries, then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of central Europe. Latin America, the industrialized countries of East Asia, and the former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are more socially conservative, followed by South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s most illiberal region is the Islamic Middle East.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Eisner, together with the historian Randolph Roth, notes that crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.33”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In 1800, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, most people everywhere were poor. The average income was equivalent to that in the poorest countries in Africa today (about $500 a year in international dollars), and almost 95 percent of the world lived in what counts today as “extreme poverty” (less than $1.90 a day). By 1975, Europe and its offshoots had completed the Great Escape, leaving the rest of the world behind, with one-tenth their income, in the lower hump of a camel-shaped curve.20 In the 21st century the camel has become a dromedary, with a single”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Religions can also clash with humanism by valuing souls above lives, which is not as uplifting as it sounds. Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal, because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one’s existence;”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the wake of the 2016 American election, the New York Times writers David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg reflected on the media’s role in its shocking outcome: Trump was the beneficiary of a belief—near universal in American journalism—that “serious news” can essentially be defined as “what’s going wrong.” . . . 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

“que los políticos de la identidad, la política de la corrección política y los guerreros de la justicia social se hayan apropiado de la izquierda abre un espacio para los charlatanes que se jactan de «llamar las cosas por su nombre». Un desafío de nuestra época estriba en fomentar una cultura intelectual y política que esté impulsada por la razón en lugar de por el tribalismo y la reacción mutua.”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

“Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis” trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! 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

“disasters are instant, improvements are gradual”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Natural selection consists of competition among genes to be represented in the next generation, and the organisms we see today are descendants of those that edged out their rivals in contests for mates, food, and dominance.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Door aan het licht te brengen dat de wetten die in het universum gelden geen doel hebben, dwingen wetenschappelijke krachten ons verantwoordelijkheid te nemen voor ons eigen welzijn, onze soort en onze planeet.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Genetic individuality gives us our different tastes and needs, and it also sets the stage for strife.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.20 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

“Populism is an old man’s movement.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.”35 Why should education have mattered so much? Two uninteresting explanations are that the highly educated happen to affiliate with a liberal political tribe, and that education may be a better long-term predictor of economic security than current income. A more interesting explanation is that education exposes people in young adulthood to other races and cultures in a way that makes it harder to demonize them. Most interesting of all is the likelihood that education, when it does what it is supposed to do, instills a respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so inoculates people against conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdote, and emotional demagoguery.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Better still, improvements build on one another. A richer world can better afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated and connected world cares more about the environment, indulges fewer autocrats, and starts fewer wars.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, “We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones. By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Violent crime is a solvable problem.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As Thomas Hobbes noted in 1651, “Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The historian Yuval Harari notes that terrorism is the opposite of military action, which tries to damage the enemy’s ability to retaliate and prevail.”
― 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.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress