20th-century Philosopher Quotes

Jean-Paul Sartre

Albert Camus

Simone de Beauvoir

Umberto Eco

Theodor W. Adorno

Noam Chomsky

Hannah Arendt

It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist.

My studies gave me only a very superficial knowledge of philosophy but sharpened my interest in it. I benefited greatly from being a teacher—that is, from being able to spend a great deal of time reading, writing and educating myself.

Simone de Beauvoir

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

Theodor W. Adorno

In this loveless everyday life eroticism is a substitute for love.

All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.

Europe is as fearful of Islam today as she has been in the past. She now knows that the strength of Islam (which in the past expressed that of the Arabs) has been reborn and has appeared in a new form: Arab nationalism.

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system

Giorgio Agamben

The Afghans have stood firm in the face of all odds and pressures and have indeed made the greatest of sacrifices. They have sacrificed a million and a half people. They are no longer afraid of death. The truth is that when death seems far away then fear of it is magnified, but this fear disappears for those who see it close to them. For the Afghans, death is no longer something to be avoided!

The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History.

Louis Althusser

Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be.

G. E. M. Anscombe

It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility.

The trouble is that the expression 'material thing' is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for 'sense-datum'; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he 'perceives.

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.

Alfred Jules Ayer

Tyranny, when they are strong, and democracies, when they are weak, can not tolerate criticism.

I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.

Brain is inert matter. Brain cannot create any thoughts. Brain can only react to the thoughts which come from outside and then get involved.

Ramesh Balsekar

Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.

Georges Bataille

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

Jean Baudrillard

A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.

Assigning central importance to the aesthetic in human experience may seem to be a radical inversion, placing what is usually considered secondary and peripheral at the center of the human world as its nourishing source. Isn't this an ingenuous simplification of the vast range and complexity of experience?

Arnold Berleant

The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and... all forms of rationalism... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method... was considerable and perhaps crucial.