Sparks Commentary

In 1656, Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated , from the  Jewish  community into which he was born. He had taught some doctrines that offended ...

Long before I watched this film, I watched another PBS documentary about  Benjamin Franklin . This earlier film was by Muffie Meyer, who has...

In the seventeenth century , Thomas Hobbes gave the most powerful argument ever written for the necessity of some form of government. His o...

John Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” is one of the greatest political works ever written. It had a massive influence on the founding d...

It’s quite an achievement when you can make an audiobook about chemistry that is understandable for someone like me. Chemistry was literally...

“It is evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature: and that however wide any of them may seem to run f...

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke on 5 February 1675 Sir Is...

“I openly confess, the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first awakened me from my dogmatic slumber , and ga...

“ Cogito, ergo sum .” (“I think, therefore I am.”) – René Descartes, in his works “Discourse on the Method” (1637) and “Principles of Philo...

The battle over the Sun-centered universe was as much political as it was scientific. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries , a th...

Voltaire and Rousseau disagreed with each other on many issues. Nonetheless, they do have at least one thing in common, which is that they w...

“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. H...

“The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, 'This is mine,' and found people simple eno...

When the Founding Fathers wrote the original Constitution in 1787, they were creating a document that would change everything in America, ...

"The political liberty of the [citizen] is a tranquillity of mind, arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order t...

"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them wi...

"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of th...

"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union , establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide...

" ... every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neit...