Letter to John Adams (1 August 1816)
1810s
“no people can be both ignorant and free.”
“Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.”
Variant: If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”
Source: The Wealth of Nations
Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Extra-judicial writings, Speech to the Board of Regents (1952)
Discourses
Variant: ...none ought to be educated but the free;...
Book II, ch. 1.
“Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.”
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: Every physician, shoemaker, mechanic or educator must know his shortcomings if he is to do his work and make his living. For some decades, you have begun to play a governing role on this earth. It is on your thinking and your actions that the future of humanity depends. But your teachers and masters do not tell you how you really think and are; nobody dares to voice the one criticism of you which could make you capable of governing your own fate. You are "free" only in one sense: free from education in governing your life yourself, free from self-criticism.
