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The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.

The Enlightenment was a scene of intellectual conflict that drew upon utterly foreign cultures in the ancient world and in the New World to destabilize systems of oppression. It was not a unified program but a process of creative intellectual destruction.

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

Political corruption, instability, and conflict are the natural results of the abandonment of reason.

Unreasonable distributions of wealth have always turned their fire on reason.