Thomas More
For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.
Desiderius Erasmus
the chief element of happiness is this; to want to be what you are
Francis Bacon
empiricism; knowledge is achieved through systematic observation / sensory experience
Galileo Galilei
the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics
Thomas Hobbes
without the rule of law the state of nature is solitary, short, poor, brutish
Isaac Newton
asserting that the universe/nature runs according to law-governed mechanical principles
Rene Descartes
Cogito ergo sum
Antoine Arnauld
precision of thought is essential to life
Nicolas Malebranche
3 types of matter, mind, matter & God
Benedict de Spinoza
mind and body are different ways of conceiving the same reality
G.W. von Leibniz
the world is made up of an infinity of monads
John Locke
Tabula Rasa
David Hume
Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once
Thomas Reid
rejecting the assumption that the mind is an intermediaries between the subject & the world
Voltaire
freedom of expression
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains
Denis Diderot
scepticism is the first step towards truth
George Berkeley
To be is to be perceived
Immanuel Kant
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
Johann Christoph Schiller
the voice of the majority is no proof of justice
Frederick Wilhelm Schelling
termed the word “unconsciousness”