19th-century Philosopher Quotes

Karl Marx

Friedrich Nietzsche

Bertrand Russell

Søren Kierkegaard

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Max Weber

Rosa Luxemburg

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Søren Kierkegaard

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.

Bertrand Russell

Help thyself: then everyone will help thee too. Principle of Christian charity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Scholars may quote Plato in studies, but the hearts of millions shall quote the Bible at their daily toil, and draw strength from its inspiration, as the meadows draw it from the brook.

Moncure D. Conway

Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting.

Franz Rosenzweig

A system is said to be coherent if every fact in the system is related every other fact in the system by relations that are not merely conjunctive. A deductive system affords a good example of a coherent system.

We need not seek a cause or a motive or a purpose for that which is, in its nature, eternally self-existent and free.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Nature around us is order and reason, exactly as is the human mind. Our everyday activity implies a perfect confidence in the universality of the laws of nature.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

John Alexander Smith

The moral and religious teachings of no bible reach a higher altitude than the intelligence and mental development of the age and country which produced it.

I said that an observed fact only becomes a scientific fact when all the observers are in unanimous agreement.

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy

The secret of all true persuasion is to induce the person to persuade himself.

Harry Allen Overstreet

Its women are lovely and stubborn, its men angry and ingenious. Is there a land anywhere like southern Illinois?

When brought to the proletariat from the capitalist class, science is invariably adapted to suit capitalist interests. What the proletariat needs is a scientific understanding of its own position in society. That kind of science a worker cannot obtain in the officially and socially approved manner. The proletarian himself must develop his own theory. For this reason he must be completely self-taught.

Hitherto, it must be admitted that American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common.

Alain LeRoy Locke

Children like to work, and are always eager to imitate the work of adults.

Georgi Plekhanov

Evil does not approach us as pride any more, but on the contrary as slumber, lassitude, concealment of the "I." … It may make us so quickly contented, that any definitive fire will die down. The venomous, breathtaking frigid mist seems able … to harden hearts and fill them with envy, obduracy and resentment, with bloody scorn for the divine image and light, with all the causes of the only true original sin, which is not wanting to be like God.

Surely death acquires a new and deeper significance when we regard it no longer as a single and unexplained break in an unending life, but as a part of the continuously recurring rhythm of progress-as inevitable, as natural and benevolent as sleep.

J. M. E. McTaggart

Sexuality throws no light upon love, but only through love can we learn to understand sexuality.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Now, when we say of any occurrence that it is 'physical', we mean thereby that it is potentially describable in physical terms. (Otherwise the expression would be wholly meaningless.) So it is perfectly correct, to state that, in every happening with which our sensory nerves are associated, we find, after we have abstracted therefrom every known or imaginable physical component, certain categorically nonphysical residue.

John William Dunne

A healthy appetite for righteousness, kept in due control by good manners, is an excellent thing; but to hunger and thirst after it is often merely a symptom of spiritual diabetes.

To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures.

Had the God of the Quran been the Lord of all creatures, and been Merciful and kind to all, he would never have commanded the Mohammedans to slaughter men of other faiths, and animals, etc. If he is Merciful, will he show mercy even to the sinners? If the answer be given in the affirmative, it cannot be true, because further on it is said in the Quran "Put infidels to sword," in other words, he that does not believe in the Quran and the Prophet Mohammad is an infidel (he should, therefore, be put to death). (Since the Quran sanctions such cruelty to non-Mohammedans and innocent creatures such as cows) it can never be the Word of God.

Dayanand Saraswati

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

Nicholas Murray Butler