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77,150 books
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287,584 voters
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read (195)
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“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
“You should not expect the media to provide you with a fact-based worldview any more than you would think it reasonable to use a set of holiday snaps of Berlin as your GPS system to help you navigate around the city.”
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
“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.”
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.'
A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Thomas’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Thomas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
3,770 books
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451 friends
2,635 books
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13 friends
617 books
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44 friends
5,801 books
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1,101 friends
239 books
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35 friends
720 books
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43 friends
1,245 books
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81 friends
1,081 books
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54 friends
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Favorite Genres
Classics, Crime, Fiction, Historical fiction, History, Philosophy, Poetry, Science, Suspense, and Thriller
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