“The moral value of quantification is that it treats all lives as equally valuable, so actions that bring down the highest numbers of homicides prevent the greatest amount of human tragedy.”
Source: Enlightenment Now (2018), p. 173
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Steven Pinker 33
psychologist, linguist, author 1954Related quotes

“All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.”
“Recapitulation”
The Living City (1958)

Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)
Context: It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropomorphic concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near to those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems.
From a letter to Murray W. Gross (26 April 1947), p. 138

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 64

“That Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers”
An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) Treatise II, Section 3
Context: That Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery.

“The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.”
"Credo" (1991); also in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! : Collected Essays, 1934-1998 (1999), p. 360
1990s

“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”

Most of them do not result in anybody’s being shot, much less shot dead, because most of them do not involve discharging a firearm. As it turns out, pointing a gun at a would-be assailant is in many cases a very persuasive gesture.
"The Dumbest Gun-Control Paragraph" https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dumbest-gun-control-paragraph/ (3 June 2019), National Review

"Of Selling Paradise"
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings