Word: diderot
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...scholar of the Enlightenment era, tends to view his subject as a direct descendant of 18th century atheists and rationalists like Voltaire and Diderot. Therefore it is with deepening irony that the reader discovers that by the 1920s, psychoanalysis had begun to resemble a religion. Freud's apostles begat apostates who in turn spawned heresies and a bemusing number of therapeutic sects, each claiming to have a piece of the true couch...
...young politician had, said a friend,"a calm expression, a penetrating blue eye -- and looked like a thinking man." He studied Locke and Hume, thought deeply about political philosophy, became a protege of Jefferson's. The author of the Declaration of Independence sent him books from Paris: Voltaire, Diderot, Mirabeau. Madison sent back grafts of native American plants: pecans, cranberries...
...Denis Diderot answered with encyclopedic cynicism: "The voluptuous rubbing of two intestines...
Under frescoed portraits of Diderot and Voltaire, luminaries ranging from Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez to Novelists Norman Mailer and William Styron and Actress Sophia Loren debated such topics as state control of the arts and the unemployment crisis. In between they supped at the Foreign Ministry and lunched with Mitterrand. So dazzling was the cast that even the stars sometimes seemed overwhelmed. Said Film Director Francis Ford Coppola: "The people here are incredible. It's like a college-a very good college." The meeting, Italian Theater Director Giorgio Strehler concluded grandly in his summation, had provoked...
Every volume was a bestseller. The tenth, Rousseau and Revolution, won a 1968 Pulitzer Prize. Yet the very qualities that helped sell his books often earned the sneers of scholars. He gave history's eccentrics (Casanova, Caligula) more than their due. He was often glib ("Voltaire + Rousseau = Diderot"). On the other hand, he was capable of aphoristic wisdom that any academician would envy ("A nation is born Stoic, dies Epicurean...