A Quote by Richard Dawkins

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

Richard Dawkins

Quote Topics

America Enlightenment Reason Schools Science Threat Truth

Quote Author

Richard Dawkins
English - Scientist
Born: March 26, 1941

There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our Puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom.

Sherwin Wine

Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.

James K. A. Smith

In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.

Salman Rushdie

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

Friedrich Durrenmatt

The greatest threat to America is not necessarily a recession or even another terrorist attack. The greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias.

Lamar S. Smith

Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.

Allen W. Wood

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'

Ray Bradbury

As I study both the exoteric and the esoteric schools of Buddhism, they maintain that human beings are endowed with Dharma-nature by birth. If this is the case, why did the Buddhas of all ages - undoubtedly in possession of enlightenment - find it necessary to seek enlightenment and engage in spiritual practice?

Dogen

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

John Taylor Gatto

Authenticity is fundamental, more fundamental than spiritual enlightenment. Without authenticity, no genuine spiritual enlightenment is possible. Authenticity is the state of being committed to truth. Truth is simple. And no matter how simply a truth is stated, only those who have walked the path of understanding and evolution on their own can know and understand it authentically. The path of truth is the path least traveled. Authenticity is the clarity of being in which there is no self-deceit.

Yasuhiko Kimura

Theology is but a science of applied to God. As schools change theology must necessarily change. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas of truth are not. Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged.

Henry Ward Beecher

Nothing is less suspenseful than a threat that threatens the maker of the threat at least as much as the subject of the threat. Congress hasn't learned this yet, but America has learned it over and over.

Walter Kirn

In America people have this funny idea about enlightenment and money. Money expresses a level of commitment. Studying enlightenment is like going to a university.

Frederick Lenz

We have to realize that ISIS and Islamic terrorists are not only a threat to America. They are a threat to all of Western society.

Todd Wilcox

Today, over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math, science technology and engineering, yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools.