Andrew Wiles Quotes

I am a person of the 18th century.

Look at the 18th century. There was a lot more freedom going on.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

Look at what left-wing movements were like in the 19th century - they were all about progress, the engineering of the world, the reshaping of nature, and so on. It's only postwar, really, that people on the left have come to see the environment as a critical issue.

I'm a creature of the eighteenth century at heart: The Enlightenment and the search for happiness suit me.

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.

Bill Clinton was in the line of great progressive presidents who faced the realities in his own time and applied innovative solutions to problems.

We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter.

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.

I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well.

We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.

If you don’t understand how problems came to be, how are you going to know how to fix them?

When an 18th century constitution forms the charter of liberty of a 20th century government, must its general provisions be construed and interpreted by an eighteenth century mind in the light of eighteenth century conditions and ideals? Clearly not. This were to command the race to halt in its progress, to stretch the state upon a veritable bed of Procrustes.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

Modern Times. It’s a very good historical book about history.