Famous Quotes of History - Enlightenment/Scientific Revolution

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The Enlightenment

- Famous Quotes Throughout World History -
The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution

Galileo Galilei 1564 - 1642

1632 - After his recantation that the earth moves around the sun:

"Eppur si muove."
(But it does move.)

- attributed

René Descartes 1596 - 1650

"Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it."

"Cogito, ergo sum." (I think, therefore I am.)

Thomas Hobbes 1588 - 1679

1651 - Leviathan

"True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood."

"Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them."

"They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion."

"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man."

"For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary."

"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Last words:
"I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark."

John Locke 1632 - 1704

1690 - Essay concerning Human Understanding

"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."

"No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience."

"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth."

"Reason is natural revelation."

"Crooked things may be as stiff and unflexible as straight: and men may be as positive in error as in truth."

"All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it."

1690 - Second Treatise of Civil Government

"Whatsoever ... (man) removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property."

"The end of law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom."

"This power to act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it, is that which is called prerogative."

Sir Isaac Newton 1642 - 1727

February 5, 1676
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

1687 - Principia Mathematica
"Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it."

1687 - Principia Mathematica
"To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction."

1687 - Principia Mathematica
"I do not feign hypotheses."

"I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Philippe Néricault Destouches 1680 - 1754

"The absent are always in the wrong."

David Hume 1711 - 1776

1739 - A Treatise upon Human Nature
"It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."

1741 - 1742 - Essays: Moral and Political
"Avarice, the spur of industry."

1741 - 1742 - Essays: Moral and Political
"Money ... is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy."

1741 - 1742 - Essays: Moral and Political
"In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies of liberty."

1741 - 1742 - Essays: Moral and Political
"Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."

1748 - Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
"Custom, then, is the great guide of human life."

1748 - Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 - 1778

1762 - Du Contrat social

"Man was born free,
and everywhere he is in chains."

Frederick the Great 1712 - 1786

March 19, 1771 - Letter to Voltaire
"Drive out prejudices through the door, and they will return through the window."

June 18, 1757 - To hesitant Guards at Kolin
"Rascals, would you live for ever?" (attributed)

His interpretation of benevolent despotism:
"My people and I have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please." (attributed)

Empress Catherine the Great 1729 - 1796

"I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his."

Immanuel Kant 1724 -1804

1784
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made."

1785 - Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics
"There is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, without having as its condition any other purpose to be attained by it. This imperative is Categorical. ... This imperative may be called that of Morality."

1785 - Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics
"Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination."

1788 - Critique of Practical Reason
"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me."

Bishop Samuel Horsley 1733 - 1806

"In this country ... the individual subject ... has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them."

- Famous Quotes Throughout World History -

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