Andrew Gerber

“My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity’s great spirit.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt

“Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity … tempered by humility, disciplined with patience. Science”
― Robert Charles Wilson, Darwinia

“economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“physicist David Deutsch’s defense of enlightenment, The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch argues that if we dare to understand, progress is possible in all fields, scientific, political, and moral: Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . 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.3”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress