Top 100 The Enlightenment Quotes
#1. The teacher has nothing to do with people who use their mental powers to block the enlightenment of others. These people lack control. What can you teach someone who lacks control?
Frederick Lenz
#2. Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
Jan Peter Balkenende
#3. Finally, a principal reason for the lack of attention to "unclean spirits" and Jesus' "acts of power" in the Gospel stories is surely the modern "scientific" frame of mind that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment reduction of reality to what was natural and comprehensible by reason.
Richard A. Horsley
#4. The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
Theodor Adorno
#5. Through reading the scriptures, we can gain the assurance of the Spirit that that which we read has come of God for the enlightenment, blessing, and joy of his children.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#6. Kundalini can be transmitted. A person who is very adept at the enlightenment process can transmit it. Whether you feel it or not, it's affecting you in a very positive way.
Frederick Lenz
#7. The Encyclopedia
the advance artillery of reason, the armada of philosophy, the siege engine of the enlightenment ...
Peter Prange
#8. I believe in the Enlightenment, Devra. And I don't think that's gonna change. Not now. Not ever.
Felicia Hajra-Lee
#9. This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale
Christopher Hitchens
#10. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Umberto Eco
#11. The origins of the modern West are often seen in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but the roots of the Enlightenment can be found in habits of mind cultivated in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, and the institutions that grew from them.
Ibn Warraq
#12. Smartass Disciple: Master, please show me the way to the enlightenment.
Master of Stupidity: Walk with me! [but I won't let you try to surpass me].
Toba Beta
#13. We've got to stand up not only for free speech, but also for all that we've inherited from the Enlightenment and from Christianity.
Roger Scruton
#14. The high-priests and priestesses of Atlantis had discovered many of the deepest secrets of the universe. They had come to understand all about reincarnation, karma, and the innermost workings of the Enlightenment Cycle.
Frederick Lenz
#15. The Enlightenment taught that observation unrecorded was knowledge lost.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#16. Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire.
Andrew Roberts
#17. I love the way Monteverdi's opera embodies the triumph of evil love in such a luscious way. The closing love duet is just pure amoral, liquid passion. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment sound great in the Albert Hall, and the Glyndebourne cast is fabulous.
Charles Hazlewood
#18. The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had just been a war that was worse than the war of 1812, and worse than the Revolution; things were clearly not getting better and better.
Christine Jennings
#19. There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.
Tony Campolo
#20. From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.
David Cameron
#21. I don't work with men who are antagonistic to the liberation of women. I do work with quite a number of men who are supportive of the enlightenment of women. Such men are rare.
Frederick Lenz
#22. We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment ... [it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.
James Q. Wilson
#23. I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.
Steven Pinker
#24. Western theology invariably asks the question: Are miracles possible? This of course addresses the Enlightenment problem of a closed universe. In much of Asia that is a non-question because the miraculous is assumed and fairly regularly experienced. - Hwa Yung
Craig S. Keener
#25. The nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life.
Morris Berman
#26. The enlightenment experience is not what you think. How could it be anything that you can configure, anything you can imagine, any way that you think it should be?
Frederick Lenz
#27. The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
Michel Foucault
#28. I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.
David Hockney
#29. Technology isn't fulfilling its promise of unlimited progress and solving every problem through technology. With the Enlightenment and its aftermath, there already was a general loss of confidence in the Western religions.
Thomas Keating
#30. The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
Richard Dawkins
#31. Starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call "the great reversal." Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in - and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.
Ken Wilber
#32. I am very interested in the enlightenment of women. Very few teachers of advanced self discovery work with women, and if they do it's usually in a very second handed way. They treat women as second class citizens.
Frederick Lenz
#33. America became a special source of attraction to people who were fleeing the aftereffects of the 30 Years War and the religious persecution that began to sweep through Europe in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And when people got here, very often they succeeded.
Mitch Horowitz
#34. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer
#35. The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason's protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason's limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn.
James K. Morrow
#36. We are so accustomed to classifying judgments, arguments and deeds in terms of morality that we forget how relatively new the notion was in the culture of the Enlightenment.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#37. The religious wars showed that the Christian faith was no longer Europe's unifying force. A new common ground was needed, and it was found in reason, which is something that is shared by all of mankind. This was one of the roots of the Enlightenment and its concept of universal human rights.
Walter Kasper
#38. If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
Umberto Eco
#39. Knowledge of the Enlightenment Cycle, of the ways that inner dimensions and nirvana work, lifts you far above the transient sorrows, pains, pleasures and joys that the unenlightened masses experience.
Frederick Lenz
#40. Enlightenment is man's exodus from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the inability to use one's understanding without the guidance of another person..'Dare to Know'(sapere aude) Have the courage to use your own understanding;this is the motto of the Enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant
#41. While the romantics rejected the Enlightenment's exaltation of reason, many theologians accepted it and sought to frame the Bible as a set of empirical data.
Joseph Laycock
#42. The later stages of the enlightenment process are trickier, and it is really essential to have a teacher then. You need correction, direction, and most of all you need a master's auric empowerment.
Frederick Lenz
#43. Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
Noam Chomsky
#44. Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose.
John Edward Williams
#45. The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.
Ken Wilber
#46. 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.
Tariq Ali
#47. Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.
David Deutsch
#48. The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
Pankaj Mishra
#49. The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.
David Deutsch
#50. There exist three poisons in life: desire, anger, and ignorance. One poison is the root of the other two. To attain enlightenment, you must swallow the root of your poisons, so that you die. You die many times to attain the enlightenment of Buddha.
H.S. Kim
#51. Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority ... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant
#52. 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.
Robert Darnton
#53. The Enlightenment needs more shadow; the Romantic Movement less.
Mason Cooley
#54. Perpetual wakefulness doesn't mean you have all physical knowledge, that you can speak all languages, that you can fix cars ... that is a storybook, Hollywood version of the enlightenment experience.
Frederick Lenz
#55. He tapped into the Zen of ignorance, the enlightenment of absurdity.
Christopher Moore
#56. It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch.
Rebecca Goldstein
#57. The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.
Isaiah Berlin
#58. Our public monuments are memorials to the Enlightenment.
Mason Cooley
#59. The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.
Theodor Adorno
#60. The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.
J.G. Ballard
#61. I think that technology is essentially a continuation of a divestment of theological power that's been happening since The Enlightenment. It's the idea that God can see and hear everything.
Joshua Cohen
#62. ...people taking the time and energy to ask about what they do not understand - I have renewed hope that society can shed its superstitions and embrace the enlightenment that comes from just a basic understanding of how the universe works.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#63. Friedrich Nietzsche: "If Luther had been burned like Hus, the dawn of the Enlightenment might perhaps have come a little earlier and more brilliantly than we can now imagine.
Timothy George
#64. 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.
Eric Kandel
#65. Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.
Shelby D. Hunt
#66. What the world needs more than anything are Bodhisattvas of peace, lawyers, politicians, teachers working tirelessly for the enlightenment of themselves and others.
Sogyal Rinpoche
#67. The scientific picture of the world championed since the Enlightenment is not just wrong but massively wrong. Indeed entire fields of inquiry, especially in the human sciences, will need to be rethought from the ground up in terms of intelligent design.
William A. Dembski
#68. If you seek to develop the mind fully, for the enlightenment process, you will benefit if your career is related to computer science, law, medicine, or the arts.
Frederick Lenz
#69. As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.
Henning Mankell
#70. Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.
Amy Chua
#71. 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.
Jill Lepore
#72. By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
E. O. Wilson
#73. Today's China is an artifact of an extended and contentious history while the relatively young American Republic is a daring project informed by the enlightenment philosophy espoused by the Founding Fathers.
Patrick Mendis
#74. The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.
Steven Pinker
#75. Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
Theodor Adorno
#77. Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.
Voltaire
#78. They just teach by their presence. They don't really have a message for humanity. It's irrelevant at that point. They're just a fluid, perfect embodiment of what we call the dharmakaya or the enlightenment of nirvana .
Frederick Lenz
#79. Her face lit up; illuminated by the enlightenment of recognition and the innocence of surprise.
Joss Sheldon
#80. Culture, with its processes and functions, is a subject upon which we need all the enlightenment we can achieve, and there is no direction in which we can seek with greater reward than in the facts of pre-literate societies.
Ruth Benedict
#81. My favorite cause is the enlightenment of others. I think that is the best place to put money. You get the highest yield in terms of karma on your money.
Frederick Lenz
#82. The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.
Jill Lepore
#83. The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.
James Q. Wilson
#84. Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.
Robert Bork
#85. Our freedoms were born in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the musket fires of an historic revolution.
John Boehner
#86. It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out.
Samuel Moyn
#87. In the enlightenment cycle, attention is paid to bringing back the awareness field from other lives. This does not simply mean memory, but rather the internal power and intelligence that you have amassed in other lifetimes.
Frederick Lenz
#88. History gets named afterwards: The Age of Enlightenment, the Depression. Which is not to say that people sometimes aren't depressed with all the enlightenment around them, or strangely elevated during otherwise grey times.
Terry Pratchett
#89. In the end, the problem of Europe is the same problem that haunted its greatest moment, the Enlightenment. It is the Faustian spirit, the desire to possess everything even at the cost of their souls.
George Friedman
#90. In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
#91. Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#92. The liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, that period in the eighteenth-century Europe when intellectuals and political leaders had a powerful sense that reason could be employed to make the world a better place.
John Mearsheimer
#93. The point is that the resurrection, if it had occurred, would undermine not only the Enlightenment's vision of a split world but also the Enlightenment's self-congratulatory dream of world history reaching its destiny in our own day and our own systems.
N. T. Wright
#94. The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.
Christopher Dawson
#95. Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing.
Niall Ferguson
#96. I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews.
Elaine Pagels
#97. The Enlightenment sought to rid the world of myths, but the nation could not justify itself without them.
George Friedman
#98. Many books have been written to show that Christianity has emasculated the world, that it shoved aside the enlightenment and wisdom of Hellas for a doctrine of superstition and ignorance.
Edgar Lee Masters
#99. I plan to make the case that we need to move beyond religion if we want to continue the kind of remarkable intellectual and social progress we've enjoyed since the "Enlightenment.
Alan Jeskin
#100. Is the basic teaching of Buddhism - on ignorance, deliverance and enlightenment - really life-denying, or is it rather the same kind of life-affirming liberation that we find in the Good News of Redemption, the Gift of the Spirit, and the New Creation?
Thomas Merton
