Matthew Stewart

“Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.”

“Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.”

“We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.”

“It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.”

“Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.”

“I'd like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation - more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education.”

“The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization.”

“We are all equal not because we partake in some peculiar nature or because we share in the same credo of unreasoned beliefs, but because we take it that no thinking being is incapable of seeing reason.”

“For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Whoever pays the consultant gets pretty much what they want to hear.”

“Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file.”

“Wherever I was in the world, at the beginning of every consulting project, one thing was certain: I would know less about the business at hand than the people I was supposed to be advising.”

“The conservative interpretation of American history says that wherever the word 'God' appears, it's obviously our God, it's obviously a Christian God; it's usually an evangelical God. The simplest point I'm making is: That is just absolutely not true.”

“I don't have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy - nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise.”

“It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of 'Nietzsche and German Idealism.'”

“In business, experience is the big teacher.”