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Diderot Quotes

Browse 4 quotes about Diderot.

Diderot Quotes

“What I wanted to tell you about Philidor was that Diderot wrote him a letter. You know Diderot?" "The French Revolution?" "Yeah. Philidor was doing blindfold exhibitions and burning out his brain, or whatever it was they thought you did in the eighteenth century. Diderot wrote him: 'It is foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity's sake.' I think of that sometimes when I'm analyzing my ass over a chessboard.”

ChessVanity18th CenturyDiderotGoing MadPhilidor
Book:The Queen's Gambit
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“I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God. [Letter to Thomas Law, 13 June 1814]”

AtheismPlatonicDeismProtestantDiderotBaron D HolbachCondorcetD HolbachDenis DiderotPaul Henri D HolbachD AlembertJean Le Rond D AlembertMarquis De CondorcetPlatonic Christianity
Book:Letters of Thomas Jefferson
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“With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo, by Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by Rousseau, by the French Encyclopaedists, and by the German Rationalists, among whom Lessing stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are parting company.”

ScienceCivilizationEuropeCriticismPersecutionScience And ReligionScience Vs ReligionHobbesSpinozaDescartesRousseauGalileoProtestantGalileo GalileiBaruch SpinozaDiderotGeologistsRene DescartesRené DescartesThomas HobbesBaron D HolbachD HolbachDenis DiderotJean MeslierLessingPaul Henri D HolbachGotthold Ephraim LessingGotthold LessingJean Jacque RousseauMeslier
Book:The Evolution Of Theology: An Anthropological Study
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