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certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

“Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The real world gets in the way of many digital apocalypses. When HAL gets uppity, Dave disables it with a screwdriver, leaving it pathetically singing “A Bicycle Built for Two” to itself. Of course, one can always imagine a Doomsday Computer that is malevolent, universally empowered, always on, and tamperproof. The way to deal with this threat is straightforward: don’t build one.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

in The Village Effect the psychologist Susan Pinker reviews research showing that digital friendships don’t provide the psychological benefits of face-to-face contact.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Women tend to be happier than men, but in Western countries the gap has shrunk, with men getting happier at a faster rate than women. In the United States it has reversed outright, as women got unhappier while men stayed more or less the same.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors. Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones. And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

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 1965.26 (An increase in hours spent caring for children is the main reason for the dip in leisure time visible in figure 17-6.)27 But time-use studies are no match for Norman Rockwell and Leave It to Beaver, and many people misremember the mid-20th century as a golden age of family togetherness.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

“We constantly worry about the looming ‘retirement funding crisis’ in America without realizing that the entire concept of retirement is unique to the last five decades. It wasn’t long ago that the average American man had two stages of life: work and death. . . . Think of it this way: The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.”

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

The data show that more liberal countries are also, on average, better educated, more urban, less fecund, less inbred (with fewer marriages among cousins), more peaceful, more democratic, less corrupt, and less crime- and coup-ridden.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

for all the talk about right-wing backlashes and angry white men, the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more liberal (which, as we will see, is one of the reasons those men are so angry).

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker