Ernest Renan Quotes on Freedom
Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Semitic philologist, historian, and philosopher of religion and one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals of nineteenth-century France. This page collects quotes attributed to Ernest Renan on the topic of freedom, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ernest Renan:
“A nation is a daily plebiscite.”
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Attributed to Ernest Renan:
“The truth is sad, but it makes us free.”
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“To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.”
Letter to his elder sister Henriette (1841). -
“All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient.”
Des Religions de l’antiquité et leurs derniers historiens”, Mondes , vol. 23, no. 2 (1853) p. 835, quoted in Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009).