Enlightenment Ideals Quotes & Sayings

Gratefulness is actually good for brain and body health (Korb, 2012). In one study researchers asked participants to keep a daily journal of what they were grateful for. They asked another group to write about what annoyed them. The group who recorded what they were grateful for showed greater determination, attention, enthusiasm, and energy compared to the other group. In another study the same researchers discovered that even keeping a weekly gratefulness journal reduced aches and pains. And in a Chinese study, gratefulness decreased depression and improved sleep. — Charles Stone

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. — Noam Chomsky

Albeit nurtured in democracy,
And liking best that state republican
Where every man is Kinglike and no man
Is crowned above his fellows, yet I see,
Spite of this modern fret for Liberty,
Better the rule of One, whom all obey,
Than to let clamorous demagogues betray
Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane
Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street
For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reign
Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honor, all things fade,
Save Treason and the dagger of her trade,
Or Murder with his silent bloody fee. — Oscar Wilde

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

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. — Robert Darnton

I don't know. You just seem different now. Distant. Like you have PTSD.
I knew from where I spoke. My TSD got P'd when I was tortured by a monster named Earl. — Darynda Jones

Education provide enlightenment for one's life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

He strained to say something else. I leaned toward him. He focused on me. "Rape," he promised. "Many, many times. Until you bleed ... "
"I'm so flattered. — Ilona Andrews

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

We are all equally capable of spiritual awakening. It may not seem that way, at times. Some of us are so caught up in the drama of our day-to-day existence that we have lost track of who we really are. But eventually, all of us will make the discovery of our true nature. — Victor Shamas

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. — Noam Chomsky

Reigns of terror are thus the bastard child of the Enlightenment. Terror in the name of utopian ideals would rise again and again in the coming centuries. The Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags were spawned by the enlightenment. Fascists and communists were bred on visions of human perfectibility. Tens of millions of people have been murdered in the futile effort to reform human nature and build utopian societies. During these reigns of terror, science and reason served, as they continue to serve, interests purportedly devoted to the common good
and to vast mechanisms of repression and mass killing. The belief in human perfectibility, in history as a march towards a glorious culmination, is a malformed theology. — Chris Hedges

Our freedoms were born in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the musket fires of an historic revolution. — John Boehner

The conflict is an old one. George Washington and other followers of the Enlightenment Movement wrote of their belief in an imminent maturity of humankind. The ancient and cruel feudal ways were splitting asunder at last; therefore, how could truth and freedom not prevail? In fact, the Enlightenment changed humanity forever. Yet its followers forgot something important
that each generation is invaded by a new wave of barbarians ... its children. Just as Washington, Franklin, and their peers took joy in toppling the tyranny of Church and King, so the youths of the Romantic Movement thrived on jeering the lofty ideals of their predecessors. — David Brin

The Air Loom had been constructed by the Jacobins in Paris around the time of their coup d'etat in 1793. Just as they had corrupted the ideals of the Enlightenment to their despotic ends, so had they corrupted Enlightenment science. The secret of its power was pneumatic chemistry, the science of the invisible elements known as 'airs' or 'gases,' which had been developed by some of the great geniuses who had inspired the revolution. — Mike Jay

Dare to learn.
Dare to relearn.
Dare to outlearn. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Everybody needs to know where they've been, it seems to me. Not just blackskins, but whiteskins, too. Seems to me if a person loses the past, he can't find the future either. Which is what this place is all about. — Robert McCammon

The United States is truly remarkable, a nation founded on a set of Enlightenment ideals so beautifully expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution. We should feel good about our ideals, even when we don't quite manage to live up to them. — Jay Parini

To realize the Enlightenment ideals of formal equality, the rule of law, freedom of commerce, and religious toleration, Voltaire and many of the other philosophes looked to absolutist monarchs, whose policies they hoped to influence. The support of the philosophes for the expansion of the monarch's sovereign power was tactical. It arose not out of a principled belief in the throne, but out of the recognition that only a strong monarchy had the power to override the resistance to enlightened legislation by the privileged churches, estates, and corporations that made up continental European society. (p. 45) — Jerry Z. Muller

Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility. — Susan Neiman

Love is to love and be loved — Miguel Angel Saez Gutierrez