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.