enlightenment quotes

Once regarded as the herald of enlightenment in all spheres of knowledge, science is now increasingly seen as a strictly instrumental system of control. Its use as a system of manipulation and its role in restricting human freedomnow parallel in everydetail itsuseas a means of natural manipulation.

- Murray pseudonym of  Lewis Herber Bookchin
  The Ecology of Freedom.

What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.

- Richard Condon
  Comment in D L Fitzpatrick (ed) Contemporary Novelists.

To fight for the right, to abhor the imperfect, the unjust, or the mean, to swerve neither to the right hand nor the left, to care nothing for flattery or applause or odium or abuseit is so easy to have any of them in Indianever to let your enthusiasm be soured or your courage grow dim but to remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of his ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time and to feel that somewhere among those millions you have left, a little justice, or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a springof patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenmentora stirringofduty whereit did not exist beforethat is enough, that is the Englishman's justification in India.

- Lord George Nathaniel Curzon (of Kedleston)
  Farewell speech on departing from Bombay as Viceroy of India.

Sapere aude, havethe couragetoknow: that isthemotto of enlightenment.

- Immanuel Kant
  His reply to a newspaper's challenge to define enlightenment. Quoted in The Economist,16 Mar1996.

Beware of anything that promises freedom or enlightenmenttraps for eager and clever foolsa dog has a keener noseevery creature in a cave can justify himself. Three-fourths of philosophyand literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

- Gary Sherman Snyder
  Earth House Hold,'Japan FirstTimeAround, 24: X'.