Carl Lotus Becker > Quotes

“Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.”
― Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers

“All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.”
― Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers

“Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.”
― Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers

“Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.”
― Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers

“We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.”
― Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers

“Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.”
― Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers

“Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.”
― Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers

“The amelioration of society was the very thing Philosophers had most at heart, and surely it was eminently fitting that they should be called in to tutor princes.”
― Carl L. Becker

“a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress ... until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known”
― Carl Becker, Progress and Power

“The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.”
― Carl Becker