Enlightenment Now Quotes

“Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The cognitive act of extricating oneself from the particulars of one’s life and pondering “There but for fortune go I” or “What would the world be like if everyone did this?” can be a gateway to compassion and ethics.39”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Studies that assess education at Time 1 and wealth at Time 2, holding all else constant, suggest that investing in education really does make countries richer. At least it does if the education is secular and rationalistic.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely.5”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“It’s not just the salience of a horrific event that stokes the terror. Our emotions are far more engaged when the cause of a tragedy is malevolent intent rather than accidental misfortune.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. Modern terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.11 A group or an individual seeks a slice of the world’s attention by the one guaranteed means of attracting it: killing innocent people, especially in circumstances in which readers of the news can imagine themselves. News media gobble the bait and give the atrocities saturation coverage. The Availability heuristic kicks in and people become stricken with a fear that is unrelated to the level of danger.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Who will live and who will die are not inscribed in a Book of Life. They are affected by human knowledge and agency, as the world becomes more intelligible and life becomes more precious.”
― 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.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“What’s going on is that these people are sharing blue lies. A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers).19 While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers. 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

“half of American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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

“Figure 10-1 shows that the world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The United States is famously resistant to anything smacking of redistribution. Yet it allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow. The most recent expansions are a prescription drug benefit introduced by George W. Bush and the eponymous health insurance plan known as Obamacare introduced by his successor. 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

“Scheidel concludes, “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.”28”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Wars destroy wealth-generating capital, inflate away the assets of creditors, and induce the rich to put up with higher taxes, which the government redistributes into the paychecks of soldiers and munition workers, in turn increasing the demand for labor in the rest of the economy. Wars are just one kind of catastrophe that can generate equality by the logic of Igor and Boris. The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they’re less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people’s lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore. Public opinion researchers call it the Optimism Gap.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Voltaire’s Candide who asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
― 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

“An endorsement of scientific thinking must first of all be distinguished from any belief that members of the occupational guild called 'science' are particularly wise or noble. The culture of science is based on the opposite belief -- its signature practices (including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods) are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, 'the first principle (of science) is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer. A blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group... While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth; they are trying to antagonize liberals and to display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn't passed muster with scientific and fact checking isn't so irrational after all, at least not by the criterion of the immediate affects on the believer. The affects on the society and planet are another matter.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages. The flaw has been pointed out many times.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And it explains why human beings have always been peripatetic, moving to wherever they can make the best lives. Roots are for trees; people have feet.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“(If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a “Nikon vs. Canon” Internet discussion group.)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Handwashing, midwifery, mosquito control, and especially the protection of drinking water by public sewerage and chlorinated tap water would come to save billions of lives.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The economist Steven Radelet has pointed out that “the improvements in health among the global poor in the last few decades are so large and widespread that they rank among the greatest achievements in human history.”
― 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.25 As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress