Enlightenment Thinker Quotes

It is as the father of the Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation.

Thomas Jefferson basically secularized Jesus.

Benjamin Franklin was probably America’s first juvenile delinquent.

[Describing Edmund Burke:] Burke was a damned wrong-headed fellow, through his whole life obstinate and jealous.

I found him [Benjamin Franklin] social but not talkative, and when he spoke something useful dropped from his tongue.

Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau--history’s greatest militant lowbrow

I want to be like Madame de Stael.

For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing.

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse - to challenge others to form free opinions.

Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.

I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles.

I became one of [Moses Mendelssohn] defenders. But then I heard the words "Biblical criticism" again. And, of course, afterward, I studied it more closely.

The lively phraseology of Montesquieu was the result of long meditation. His words, as light as wings, bear on them grave reflections.