Nicolas de Condorcet Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

Hypocrisy of manners, a vice peculiar to modern nations, has contributed more than one thinks to destroy that energy of character which distinguished the nations of antiquity.

Nicolas de Condorcet
[All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.

Nicolas de Condorcet
Under the freest constitution ignorant people are still slaves.

Nicolas de Condorcet
Mathematics is the science that yields the best opportunity to observe the working of the mind... and has the advantage that by cultivating it, we may acquire the habit of a method of reasoning which can be applied afterwards to the study of any subject and can guide us in the pursuit of life's object.

Nicolas de Condorcet
In every century Princes have been found to love the sciences and even to cultivate them, to attract Savants to their palaces and to reward by their favors and their amity men who afforded them a sure and constant refuge from world-weariness, a sort of disease to which supreme power seems particularly prone.

Nicolas de Condorcet
This adventure of the physical sciences... could not be observed without enlightened men seeking to follow it up in the other sciences; at each step it held out to them the model to be followed.

Nicolas de Condorcet
As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence. The strength and the limits of man

Nicolas de Condorcet
If a scholar poses himself a new problem, he can attack it fortified by the pooled resources of all his predecessors.

Nicolas de Condorcet