Enlightenment Quotes
“Knowledge would it was hoped conquer fear, superstition, enthusiasm, and prejudice”
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s
understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self imposed its causes lies not in lack of
understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s mind without another man’s guidance.”
(Immanuel Kant)
“unstoppable progress cannot be observed without having enlightened men search for it it”. Marquis de
Concorcet
"One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an
antiquarian curiosity seeker." Voltaire
On ignorance and intolerance “Crush the infamous thing”. Voltaire
Thus, the people’s deputies are not and could not be its representatives; they are merely its agent; and they
cannot decide anything finally. Any law which the people (sic) has not ratified in person is void; it is not a law
at all. The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of
Parliament; as soon as the members are elected the people is enslaved; it is nothing.” JJ Rousseau
“Women are capable of all that men are in intellecutal affairs” Voltaire
“It is a melancholy truth…that the most respectable women are the most oppressed”. Wollstonecraft
“DARE TO KNOW! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!” Immanuel Kant
“As a result, a new optimism pervaded the age. This optimism had the ultimate effect of changing man’s
opinions about human history. Instead of viewing human history as the story of the steady decline from the
Garden of Eden, men now began to view life as full of promise and hope.” (Jean le rond d’Ambert)
“We see societies establishing themselves, nations forming themselves, which in turn dominate over other
nations or become subject to them. Empires rise and fall: laws, forms of government one succeeding another; the
arts, the sciences, are discovered and are cultivated: sometimes retarded and sometimes accelerated in their
progress, they pass from one region to another. Self interest, ambition, vainglory perpetually change the scene
of the world, inundate the earth with blood. Yet in the midst of their ravages manners are gradually softened,
the human mind takes enlightenment, separate nations draw nearer to each other, commerce and policy connect
at last all parts of the globe, and the total mass of the human race by the alternations of calm and agitation, of
good conditions and of bad, marches always, although slowly, towards still higher perfection.”
(Jean le rond d’Ambert)
“A brave new world built on reason” John Locke
John Adams second president of the US once said:
“The arts and sciences, in general, during the three or four last centuries, have had a regular course of
progressive improvement. The inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation
and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity, have occasioned changes in the condition of
the world and the human character, which would have astonished the most refined nations of antiquity. A
continuation of similar exertions is everyday rendering Europe more and more like once community, or single
family.”
Joseph Priestly in a letter to noted scholar Edmund Burke noted:
“How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the
world Government, we many now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice,
calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires leaving all men the
enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more than interfering with matters of religion,
with men’s notions concerning God and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine.”
John Locke once said on the Human existence:
“Let us suppose the mind to be as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:--How comes it
to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on
it with an almost endless variety. Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To his I answer, in
one work, from Experience. In that all our knowledge is founded: and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our
observation employed either, about external sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds
perceived and reflected upon by ourselves, is that which supplies our understanding with all the materials of
thinking. These two are the fountains of all knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have or can naturally have
do spring.”