Age of Reason Quotes

I do not know what to make of a republic of 30 million atheists.

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.

Religion is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.

Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.

I am too childlike to be immature.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

I think Tom Paine is one of the greatest men that's ever lived.

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

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

One of the Age of Enlightenment's most hypnotic images is Ledoux's rendering of his neoclassical theater of 1775 - 1784 in Besancon, surreally reflected in the colossal eye of an unidentified cosmic being.

One does not arrest Voltaire.

The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance.

I think Tom Paine is one of the greatest men that's ever lived. He lived in the 18th century; as you all know, he was an Englishman who was involved in the writing of American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the French Constitution, wrote the great book called 'The Rights of Man' - commercial over.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.

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.

The Enlightenment needs more shadow; the Romantic Movement less.

This then is the age of reason.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

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.

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

Let us then, dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.