Enlightenment Now Quotes

“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

“The combination of a shorter workweek, more paid time off, and a longer retirement means that the fraction of a person’s life that is taken up by work has fallen by a quarter just since 1960.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

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

“The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.24 Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience.
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
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

“An analysis in Bangladesh confirmed that the women who worked in the garment industry (as my grandparents did in 1930s Canada) enjoyed rising wages, later marriage, and fewer and better-educated children.46 Over the course of a generation, slums, barrios, and favelas can morph into suburbs, and the working class can become middle class.47 To appreciate the long-term benefits of industrialization one does not have to accept its cruelties.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though the Nones supported Clinton over Trump by a ratio of three to one, they stayed home on November 8, 2016, while the Evangelicals lined up to vote.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Ending extreme poverty for all people everywhere! May I live to see the day. (Not even Jesus was that optimistic: he told a supplicant, “The poor you will always have with you.”)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.28”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The invention of farming around ten thousand years ago multiplied the availability of calories from cultivated plants and domesticated animals, freed a portion of the population from the demands of hunting and gathering, and eventually gave them the luxury of writing, thinking, and accumulating their ideas.”
― 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

“As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“cognitive habits of overattributing design and agency to natural phenomena,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people.9 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

“Benjamin Franklin observed, “So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“shows that in 1929 Americans spent more than 60 percent of their disposable income on necessities; by 2016 that had fallen to a third.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place.17 They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Adam Smith called it the paradox of value: when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what people are willing to pay for it. The difference is called consumer surplus, and the explosion of this surplus over time is impossible to tabulate.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820, and almost two hundredfold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“At the time when the lines begin, in the mid-18th century, life expectancy in Europe and the Americas was around 35, where it had been parked for the 225 previous years for which we have data.3 Life expectancy for the world as a whole was 29. These numbers are in the range of expected life spans for most of human history. The life expectancy of hunter-gatherers is around 32.5, and it probably decreased among the peoples who first took up farming because of their starchy diet and the diseases they caught from their livestock and each other. It returned to the low 30s by the Bronze Age, where it stayed put for thousands of years, with small fluctuations across centuries and regions.4 This period in human history may be called the Malthusian Era, when any advance in agriculture or health was quickly canceled by the resulting bulge in population, though “era” is an odd term for 99.9 percent of our species’ existence.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Five Amazing Pieces of Good News Nobody Is Reporting,” “Five Reasons Why 2013 Was the Best Year in Human History,” “Seven Reasons the World Looks Worse Than It Really Is,” “26 Charts and Maps That Show the World Is Getting Much, Much Better,” “40 Ways the World Is Getting Better,” and my favorite, “50 Reasons We’re Living Through the Greatest Period in World History.” Let’s look at some of those reasons. CHAPTER 5 LIFE”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Progress, The Progress Paradox, Infinite Progress, The Infinite Resource, The Rational Optimist, The Case for Rational Optimism, Utopia for Realists, Mass Flourishing, Abundance, The Improving State of the World, Getting Better, The End of Doom, The Moral Arc, The Big Ratchet, The Great Escape, The Great Surge, The Great Convergence.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.11”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now. —Barack Obama, 2016 CHAPTER 4 PROGRESSOPHOBIA”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“(Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.)”
― 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.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress