Enlightenment Now Quotes

“It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness—not because nature strives for disorder, but because there are so many more ways of being disorderly than of being orderly. If you walk away from a sandcastle, it won’t be there tomorrow, because as the wind, waves, seagulls, and small children push the grains of sand around, they’re more likely to arrange them into one of the vast number of configurations that don’t look like a castle than into the tiny few that do.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “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

“La vida está hecha de tiempo y una medida del progreso es una reducción del tiempo que las personas han de dedicar a mantenerse vivas a expensas de las cosas más agradables de la vida.”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

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

“The ideal of progress also should not be confused with the 20th-century movement to re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners, which the political scientist James Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism.14 The movement denied the existence of human nature, with its messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition, and social intimacy. Starting from a “clean tablecloth,” the modernists designed urban renewal projects that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, windswept plazas, and brutalist architecture. “Mankind will be reborn,” they theorized, and “live in an ordered relation to the whole.” 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

“Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is astonishing, and growing daily.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for “society,” or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human invention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“(Ecomodernists point out that organic farming, which needs far more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The most obvious is religious faith. To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason. Religions also commonly clash with humanism whenever they elevate some moral good above the well-being of humans, such as accepting a divine savior, ratifying a sacred narrative, enforcing rituals and taboos, proselytizing other people to do the same, and punishing or demonizing those who don’t. 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; that coercing people into accepting salvation is doing them a favor; and that martyrdom may be the best thing that can ever happen to you.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“People are by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by “one, two, many” and by rough guesstimates.21 They understand physical things as having hidden essences that obey the laws of sympathetic magic or voodoo rather than physics and biology: objects can reach across time and space to affect things that resemble them or that had been in contact with them in the past (remember the beliefs of pre–Scientific Revolution Englishmen).22 They think that words and thoughts can impinge on the physical world in prayers and curses. They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence.23 They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group onto any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, in black and white, and physically, treating abstract networks as concrete stuff. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them.24 They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.25 The”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Perpetual Peace,” Kant laid out measures that would discourage leaders from dragging their countries into war.20 Together with international commerce, he recommended representative republics (what we would call democracies), mutual transparency, norms against conquest and internal interference, freedom of travel and immigration, and a federation of states that would adjudicate disputes between them.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Indeed, social spending in the United States is even higher than it appears, because many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability benefits through their employers rather than the government. When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“progress is an outcome not of magic but of problem-solving.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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

“Roots are for trees; people have feet”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self:”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The only way [people] can end up equal is if they are treated unequally.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The peak age of poisoning deaths in 2011 was around fifty, up from the low forties in 2003, the late thirties in 1993, the early thirties in 1983, and the early twenties in 1973.57 Do the subtractions and you find that in every decade it’s the members of the generation born between 1953 and 1963 who are drugging themselves to death.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The human moral sense can also work at cross-purposes to our well-being.26 People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty. For every misfortune they seek a scapegoat.”
― 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.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“when things change without a human agent directing the change, they are likely to change for the worse.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Changes that take place on the scale of journalism will always show ups and downs. Solutions create new problems, which take time to solve in their term. But when we stand back from these blips and setbacks, we see that the indicators of human progress are cumulative: none is cyclical, with gains reliably cancelled by losses.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“For many reasons, it’s time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to ascetic harmony with nature. Instead, we can treat environmental protection as a problem to be solved: how can people live safe, comfortable, and stimulating lives with the least possible pollution and loss of natural habitats? Far from licensing complacency, our progress so far at solving the problem emboldens us to strive for more. It also points to the forces that pushed this progress along.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn’t exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patted by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the poor are probably unaware of how little pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief. It’s not just that they had less to spend in absolute terms; they spent a smaller proportion of their wealth. (2010s USA would be considered uber-socialist to 1960s USA).”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“To acknowledge that the lives of the lower and middle classes of developed countries have improved in recent decades is not to deny the formidable problems facing 21st-century economies.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And in yet another unsung accomplishment, the poorest of the poor—the unsheltered homeless—fell in number between 2007 and 2015 by almost a third, despite the Great Recession.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress