Quotes from Auguste Comte

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.

Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy.

If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

Foreknowledge is power.

Humanity is always made up of more dead than living.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.

Demography is destiny.

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

C'este donc par l'étude des mathématiques, et seulement par elle, que l'on peut se faire une idée juste et approfondie de ce que c'est qu'une science.

Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.

To reorganize society without God or King, by the systematic culture of Humanity.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Love our principle, order our foundation, progress our goal.

The dead govern the living.

Nothing at bottom is real except humanity.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

The dead govern the living.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.