Enlightenment Now Quotes

“And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not.”
― 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. They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech. They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations. They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens, a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else. For all these reasons, the growth of education and its first dividend, literacy is a flagship of human progress.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“and most readers have no idea whether their favorite columnists, gurus, or talking heads are more accurate than a chimpanzee picking bananas.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The danger, sometimes called the Value Alignment Problem, is that we might give an AI a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and literal-mindedly implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our interests be damned.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter?”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Nuclear power presses a number of psychological buttons—fear of poisoning, ease of imagining catastrophes, distrust of the unfamiliar and the man-made—and the dread has been amplified by the traditional Green movement and its dubiously “progressive” supporters.”
― 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.”
― 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

“But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.2”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Evolution left us with another burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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

“Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.87 American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“if religion were a source of morality, the number of religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Devil’s Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the future of forecasting, he said, “When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.”49”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Since populist movements have achieved an influence beyond their numbers, fixing electoral irregularities such as gerrymandering and forms of disproportionate representation which overweight rural areas (such as the US Electoral College) would help. So would journalistic coverage that tied candidates’ reputations to their record of accuracy and coherence rather than to trivial gaffes and scandals. Part of the problem, over the long term,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As figure 20-1 shows, support for all three of its recrudescences—Trump, Brexit, and European populist parties—falls off dramatically with year of birth. (The alt-right movement, which overlaps with populism, has a youngish membership, but for all its notoriety it is an electoral nonentity, numbering perhaps 50,000 people or 0.02 percent of the American population.)44 The age rolloff isn’t surprising, since we saw in chapter 15 that in the 20th century every birth cohort has been more tolerant and liberal than the one that came before (at the same time that all the cohorts have drifted liberalward). This raises the possibility that as the Silent Generation and older Baby Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil, they will take authoritarian populism with them.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share. . . . The silent revolution launched in the 1970s seems to have spawned a resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In another page-jumper, Silver found that the regional map of Trump support did not overlap particularly well with the maps of unemployment, religion, gun ownership, or the proportion of immigrants. But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger, which Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown is a reliable indicator of racism (”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Beneficial historical developments often create losers together with the winners, and the apparent economic losers of globalization (namely the lower classes of rich countries) are often said to be the supporters of authoritarian populism. For”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Trump proposed to relax libel laws against journalists, encouraged violence against his critics at his rallies, would not commit to respecting the outcome of the 2016 election if it went against him, tried to discredit the popular vote count that did go against him, threatened to imprison his opponent in the election, and attacked the legitimacy of the judicial system when it challenged his decisions—all hallmarks of a dictator”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally uninterested in evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-prevention measures from useless tough talk.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.87 American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.88 The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.89 Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it’s plausible that in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) And the common assertion that the two world wars were set off by the decline of religious morality (as in the former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon’s recent claim that World War II pitted “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists”) is dunce-cap history.48 The belligerents on both sides of World War I were devoutly Christian, except for the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim theocracy. The only avowedly atheist power that fought in World War II was the Soviet Union, and for most of the war it fought on our side against the Nazi regime—which (contrary to another myth) was sympathetic to German Christianity and vice versa, the two factions united in their loathing of secular modernity.49 (Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress