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Quotes About Enlightened

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened
~ Shashi Tharoor
Human beings have illusions. The enlightened don't have illusions. They see things as they are, and in that seeing, they see ecstasy and joy. They see the play of life.
~ Frederick Lenz
Scottish Whigs had helped to defeat Jacobitism in order to give birth to a new enlightened Scotland. They got their wish— with a vengeance. The years after 1745 witnessed an explosion of cultural and economic activity all across Scotland, as if the collapse of the Jacobite and Highland threat had released a tremendous pent-up store of national energy. It was economic "takeoff" in the full modern sense.
~ Arthur Herman
Pakistan is a visibly perturbed and divided nation. Its people are struggling to find an answer to the mother of all questions: what sort of a Pakistan do they want along a spectrum of choices, ranging from an orthodox, religious state to a modern, enlightened one?
~ Ayesha Jalal
Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality - the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men.
~ H. P. Lovecraft
There is always a place I can take someone's curiosity and land where they end up enlightened when we're done. That's my challenge as an educator. No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
Our intention is that of a shepherd, but our actions are those of a loving, wise, compassionate leader. If we all act according to this code, we will create an enlightened society.
~ Sakyong Mipham
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us...There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you...We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
~ Marianne Williamson
Enlightenment is a shift in worldview, and only a more enlightened thinking can deliver us to an enlightened world.
~ Marianne Williamson
In Mexico City, as in any enlightened culture, street food is king.
~ Anthony Bourdain
other words they were men and women. Frederick the Great might correspond with Voltaire, but he left his subjects cowed and stupid—"one cane to every seven men—and his neighbours, who had suffered from his enlightened aggressions, fearful and suspicious. Kings with the power of reason were not uncommon, but they lacked morality. Moreover they were too often succeeded by half-wits and weaklings. Reason was not hereditary.
~ Arthur Bryant
He replaced his glasses, which were now smeared with mucus, and manfully assumed what he liked to think was the cautious but enlightened manner of one born to high responsibility which only conscience forbade him abrogate as modesty suggested.
~ Simon Raven
The backstory of the back-and-forth during composition [...] makes it clear that Washington's insistence on elevating public education was based on a deep and urgent insight: that democracies' success depended on an educated and enlightened population.
~ John P. Avlon
Enlightened despotism: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.
~ Emil M. Cioran
It is another advantage of history, that it stores the mind with facts that apply to most subjects which occur in conversation among enlightened people. Whether morals, commerce, languages, polite literature be the object of discussion, it is history that must supply her large storehouse of proofs and illustrations.
~ barbauld anna letitia iii
I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during 'God save the King'. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so 'enlightened' that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.
~ George Orwell
In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, 'enlightened' opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
~ George Orwell
And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
~ George Orwell
I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause ; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind. [ Letter to Sir Edward Newenham, 22 June 1792 ]
~ George Washington
Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.
~ George Washington
convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority;
~ George Washington
My sister, Mr Calverleigh, was not aware, until I enlightened her, that you are not, as she had supposed, a man of character, but one of – of an unsavoury reputation!' she snapped. 'Well, what an unhandsome thing to have done!' he said reproachfully. 'Doesn't she like me any more?
~ Georgette Heyer
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.
~ Rosa Luxemburg
The British in South Africa always portrayed themselves as more enlightened and tolerant than the 'narrow-minded', 'intolerant' Boers.
~ Kwasi Kwarteng