Auguste Comte Quotes

“In a famous passage, Mill explained

Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

Yet, ironically, Mill himself could not tolerate unconventional men such as Comte, who often referred to himself as an 'eccentric thinker.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume II

“Uncannily echoing the criticism that Tocqueville was soon to make of the French in the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, Comte wrote that social reformers ran into the danger of sacrificing 'true liberty to a chimerical equality.' Like Tocqueville, Comte considered the pursuit of both liberty and equality to be absurd. Both had been useful tools in the battle against the ancien regime but now their 'natural incompatibility' had become more apparent. he wrote, 'For, a free growth develops necessarily all kinds of differences, especially mental and moral ones; as a result, if one wants to maintain the same level, one must always repress evolution.' Indeed, whereas liberty encouraged the emergence of superiority and advanced regeneration, Comte believed subverted sociability and progress. Too much social solidarity would lead to the end of society.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume II