Quotes About Optimism

We'd like to bury the idea that there's a right way and a wrong way, a smart way and a foolish way, a red way and a blue way. The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like—ahem—a Freak.

That we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like—ahem—a Freak.

It is a fact of life that people love to complain, particularly about how terrible the modern world is compared with the past. They are nearly always wrong. On just about any dimension you can think of—warfare, crime, income, education, transportation, worker safety, health—the twenty-first century is far more hospitable to the average human than any earlier time.

When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It's the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?

Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they're less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people's lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore.

Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence.

Ending extreme poverty for all people everywhere! May I live to see the day. (Not even Jesus was that optimistic: he told a supplicant, "The poor you will always have with you.")

Progress, The Progress Paradox, Infinite Progress, The Infinite Resource, The Rational Optimist, The Case for Rational Optimism, Utopia for Realists, Mass Flourishing, Abundance, The Improving State of the World, Getting Better, The End of Doom, The Moral Arc, The Big Ratchet, The Great Escape, The Great Surge, The Great Convergence.

As Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, "We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future.

Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.)

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them.

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now. —Barack Obama, 2016 CHAPTER 4 PROGRESSOPHOBIA

Voltaire's Candide who asserts that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they're less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people's lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore. Public opinion researchers call it the Optimism Gap.

In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong—wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn't-be-more-wrong.

Charles Kenny's Getting Better.17

And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better

Una civilización optimista está abierta a la innovación y no la teme, y se basa en las tradiciones de la crítica.

No matter how old you are, you have more years ahead of you than people of your age did in earlier decades and centuries.

fallaciously pessimistic.

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.

Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the "I'm OK, They're Not" illusion), which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.19