Quotes About Condorcet

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who thought that the French Revolution was the dividing line between the past and a 'glorious future', believed there were three outstanding issues in history – the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within one and the same nation, and the perfecting of mankind.

Vain labour for me — vain labour almost for the grave English language — to do justice to the sparkling paradoxes that flew from lip to lip. The favourite theme was the superiority of the moderns to the ancients. Condorcet on this head was eloquent, and to some, at least, of his audience, most convincing. That Voltaire was greater than Homer few there were disposed to deny. Keen was the ridicule lavished on the dull pedantry which finds everything ancient necessarily sublime.

On the floor was one of his large cards with a note in which he had written To do justice to Condorcet … He hadn't the heart to read further and turned it face down on the table. For the present, anyway, Condorcet would have to find another defender. In

Progress, for Comte, unlike Condorcet, is not indefinite, but continuous. And there is no room for surprise or the whims of personal liberty. It was no wonder, then, that the doctrines of Enlightenment and social science, touted to liberate man from the tyranny of the priesthood, would soon establish their own tyranny. Comte and his successors could not imagine that their gospel of progress might prove as ephemeral as the fictions of theologians or the abstractions of metaphysicians.

In his eulogy, the Marquis de Condorcet observed that whosoever pursues mathematics in the future will be guided and sustained by the genius of Euler and asserted , with much justification, that all mathematicians...are his disciples.