Delphine Leardini

“A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labor fifty hours to spend one hour reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your family budget around that—you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb—a 43,000-fold leap in affordability in two centuries. And the progress wasn’t finished: Nordhaus published his article before LED bulbs flooded the market. Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“This is catharsis. The act taps in, meets them where they are. It’s confusing, hollow. So incredibly sad. And so we’ll stay inside it a while. Not picking it apart. Not interrogating the hungry pain body, but just confirming. Yes. This place feels exactly this way. This is where you are. I get it.”
― Laurie Perez, The Power of Amie Martine

“When I grew up, bullying was considered a natural part of boyhood. It would have strained belief to think that someday the president of the United States would deliver a speech about its evils, as Barack Obama did in 2011. As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The standard explanation of the madness of crowds is ignorance: a mediocre education system has left the populace scientifically illiterate, at the mercy of their cognitive biases, and thus defenseless against airhead celebrities, cable-news gladiators, and other corruptions from popular culture.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress