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Enlightment Ideas in the Age of Revolution: Quotations to Consider

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  • Great men I call those who have excelled in the useful or agreeable. Those who sack provinces are only heroes. (Voltaire to Theriot, 15 July 1735)
  • Until a king is dragged to Tyburn with no more pomp than the meanest criminal, the people will have no conception of liberty. (Denis Diderot)
  • The First man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say ‘this is mine’ and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. (Rousseau)
  • Inequality is as absurd as that a child should govern an old man, that an imbecile should lead a wise man, that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities. (Rousseau)
  • Had women the education of men, their supposed inferiority would end. (Daniel Defoe)
  • Morality is the art which teaches man to enter on manhood and do without princes. (Adolphe von Knigge)
  • I have never believed that man’s freedom consists in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do. (Rousseau)
  • Man may wish for harmony, but Nature wants discord.” (Immanuel Kant)
  • What is better and more useful to the state, the powdered seigneur who knows at precisely what time the king rises, and at what time he goes to bed… or the merchant who enriches his country? (Voltaire)
  • Verses are hardly fashionable any longer – everybody has begun to play at being the geometer and the physicist… sentiment, imagination, and the graces have been banished. Someone who had lived under Louis XIV and returned to the world would no longer recognize the French; he’d think that the Germans had conquered this country. (Voltaire to Cideville, 16 April 1735)
  • When the arts and sciences come to perfection in any state, from that moment they naturally, or rather necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive in that nation, where they formerly flourished. (Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,’ 1742)
  • The ultimate meaning of our humanity is that we develop that higher human being within ourselves, which emerges if we continually strengthen our truly human powers, and subjugate the inhumane. (Goethe)
  • 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 every day rendering Europe more and more like one community, or single family. (John Adams, Preface to ‘A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the USA,’ 1787)