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.