Geoff Mulgan Quotes

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

If we reject science, we reject the common man.

Force does not constitute right... obedience is due only to legitimate powers.

But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.

Voltaire lighted a torch and gave to others the sacred flame. The light still shines and will as long as man loves liberty and seeks for truth.

This is the great object held out by this association; and the means of attaining it is illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason which will dispell the clouds of superstition and of prejudice.

Faith is a poison that paralyzes the mind. In all the days of your life, seek knowledge!

I believe that the future of humanity is in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth, through science, is the divine ideal which man should propose to himself.

Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

Ignorance once dispelled is difficult to reestablish.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart." - Blaise Pascal

This then is the age of reason.

Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

There are those, of course, who deny that they need any form of authority. They are the popular atheists and agnostics. Such men say that they must be shown by 'reason' whatever they are to accept as true. But the great thinkers among non-Christian men have taken no such position. They know that they cannot cover the whole area of reality with their knowledge.

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

Knowledge is our ultimate good.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to liberation.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free. Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. Where words come out from the depth of truth, where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection. Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it's way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit. Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action. In to that heaven of freedom, my father, LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE!