“Enlightenment ideals are timeless, but their realization at any moment is the strenuous achievement of nations.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
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Philosophy Quotes
363 quotes on philosophy and the big questions — from the classics to the everyday.
“Progress consists of deploying knowledge to allow all of humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
“Pessimism is so reflexively expected of an intellectual that the way to flaunt your sophistication is to wear a long face.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
“As the world has gotten more rational, it has gotten less cruel.”
Steven Pinker · The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011
“We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
“Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
“Progress is not utopia, but the gradual improvement of human flourishing through reason, science, and humanism.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”
Socrates · Plato, Phaedo
“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”
Socrates · Plato, Apology
“Know thyself.”
Socrates · adopted from the Delphic maxim
“Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.”
Socrates · Plato, Apology
“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”
Socrates · attributed
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Socrates · paraphrase from Plato, Apology
“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.”
Socrates · attributed via Diogenes Laertius
“Wisdom begins in wonder.”
Socrates · attributed
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
Socrates · reported by Diogenes Laertius
“I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.”
Socrates · attributed via Plato, Apology
