Enlightenment Now Quotes

“In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world’s people have become better off.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“All these processes are helped along by another friend of the earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An aluminum soda can used to weight three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce. Mobile phones don't need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way to cubic inches of compact disks and then to the nothingness of MP3s. The river of newsprint flowing through my apartment has been stanched by an iPad. With a terabyte of storage on my laptop I no longer buy paper by the ten-ream box. And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass--even a metronome, outdoor thermometer, and spirit level.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“being happy might make people supportive, generous, and conscientious rather than the other way around.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“For returning “washday” to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Today I take it for granted that if I want some milk, I can walk into a convenience store and a quart will be on the shelves, the milk won’t be diluted or tainted, it will be for sale at a price I can afford, and the owner will let me walk out with it after a swipe of a card, even though we have never met, may never see each other again, and have no friends in common who can testify to our bona fides. A few doors down and I could do the same with a pair of jeans, a power drill, a computer, or a car.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“What launched the Great Escape? The most obvious cause was the application of science to the improvement of material life, leading to what the economic historian Joel Mokyr calls “the enlightened economy.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Not only has chronic undernourishment been in decline, but so have catastrophic famines”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune may be no one’s fault.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: “progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A medida que los países se vuelven más inteligentes, se alejan de Dios.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“Affordable transportation does more than reunite people. It also allows them to sample the phantasmagoria of Planet Earth. This is the pastime that we exalt as “travel” when we do it and revile as “tourism” when someone else does it, but it surely has to count as one of the things that make life worth living. To see the Grand Canyon, New York, the Aurora Borealis, Jerusalem—these are not just sensuous pleasures but experiences that widen the scope of our consciousness, allowing us to take in the vastness of space, time, nature, and human initiative. Though we bristle at the motor coaches and tour guides, the selfie-shooting throngs in their tacky shorts, we must concede that life is better when people can expand their awareness of our planet and species rather than being imprisoned within walking distance of their place of birth. With”
― 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”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic or civilization-clashing. The overwhelming majority of victims of Islamic violence and repression are other Muslims.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“John Dryden wrote that a work of fiction is “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When humans took up farming, they became more disruptive still. According to the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the adoption of wet rice cultivation in Asia some five thousand years ago may have released so much methane into the atmosphere from rotting vegetation as to have changed the climate. “A good case can be made,” he suggests, that “the people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though terrorists hope for the best, their small-scale violence almost never gets them what they want.”
― 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.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it’s a good problem to have.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a reputation.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress