The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

Knowing others is wisdom knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.

Not when truth is dirty but when it is shallow does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the spirit in you since that is already enlightened and has no need to seek. No it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.

Only one person in a million becomes enlightened without a teacher's help.

This could never be a crime in any society which deems himself enlightened.

Modernity the child of the Enlightenment failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science especially in the schools of America.

Today's consumers are eager to become loyal fans of companies that respect purposeful capitalism. They are not opposed to companies making a profit indeed they may even be investors in these companies - but at the core they want more empathic enlightened corporations that seek a balance between profit and purpose.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people with respect to our political interests than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.

I really love idiot enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.

The more that social democracy develops grows and becomes stronger the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies the leadership of their movement and the determination of its direction into their own hands.

We hope the world will act in the spirit of enlightened self-interest.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and honestly I may as well just start it again now because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history and Europe has helped write ours.

History shows that our way of life is the stronger way. From it has come more wealth more industry more happiness more human enlightenment than from any other way.

Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky the great ocean and the highest peak empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.