Enlightenment Thinking Quotes

Consider the Essay as a political pamphlet on the Revolution side, and the fact that it was the Whig gospel for a century, and you will see its working merit.

Napoleon was probably the equal at least of Washington in intellect, his superior in education. Both of them were successful in serving the state.

The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians.

The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

Faith in reason was the foundation stone of the United States.

I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

There are two books that I often travel with; one is 'The Theory on Moral Sentiments' by Adam Smith. The other is 'The Meditations.' It's not that I agree with either views expressed in the books, but I believe ideas and thoughts of older generations can offer food for thought for the current generation.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Why must we be eternally on our knees before the Kants and Hugos?

Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.

It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men…. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [creating the U. S. Constitution] had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

Why consider debates in the English House of Commons in 1628 along with documents on American developments in the late eighteenth century? The juxtaposition is not capricious, because the Commons during this period generated many of the ideas that were later embodied in the government of the United States.

I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.

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 became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old.

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.

The founding fathers didn't see it that way. They didn't see many things.... We now have to raise their consciousness.

The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.

In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.