American Philosopher Quotes

Noam Chomsky

Hannah Arendt

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

John Rawls

Thomas Kuhn

Hilary Putnam

Willard van Orman Quine

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

Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible.

Although data about science are to some extent malleable, they are not totally plastic.

We live in a world populated by structures - a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history

Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.

For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites...

The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power.

No new choices are introduced by raising the specter of disaster. These become opportunities for swearing new allegiance to technology. The solution is to discover new technologies that will correct and modify the harm either potentially or already caused by present technologies.

Donald Phillip Verene

The principal way that cognitive science can contribute to epistemology, I claim, is to identify basic belief-forming, or problem-solving processes. Once identified, these processes would be examined by primary epistemology according to the evaluative dimensions and standards adduced in Part I.

Next to the word 'Nature,' 'the Great Chain of Being' was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word 'evolution' in the late nineteenth.

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

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

The leap of faith is a strategic impasse that confronts every Christian in search of converts; and, as he sees the matter, there is no wrong way to become a Christian. It is the end that is importnat, not the means; it does not matter why you believe, so long as you believe. For the philosopher, in contrast, the paramount issue is the justification of belief, not the fact of belief itself.

George H. Smith

When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.

Jacob Needleman

We are scientific people and we want our students to feel the enthusiasm and promise of the scientific method. We want them to feel the moral quality of exact technique, as exact as the subject matter permits. We want them to feel that science is a spiritual experience.

William Ernest Hocking

Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state -
leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression.

Andrew Bernstein

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

Norman O. Brown

No problem is more crucial for a naturalistic view of the world than the mind-body problem.

Roy Wood Sellars

To say that mathematics in general has been reduced to logic hints at some new firming up of mathematics at its foundations. This is misleading. Set theory is less settled and more conjectural than the classical mathematical superstructure than can be founded upon it.

Willard van Orman Quine

My view [is] that what morality boils down to is, Don't harm, and do help. And now the question is, Can creatures like chickens and cows be harmed? And the answer is, Of course they can. Consequently, I think it's immoral to harm them. And that seems to me to provide a very strong moral reason to be vegetarian, to not wear leather... it seems to me that our treatment of animals is morally appalling... and that we ought to radically revise the way we live, precisely because they feel pain, they can be hurt, and we're constantly hurting these creatures!

It seems to me that philosophers should be more relaxed about whether or not some form of materialism is true.

Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.

Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence.

I'm a student of contemporary culture. Not only do I like shopping malls, but I love to pick up fundamentalist preachers on the radio. It tells me so much about society and about people — what they're thinking."

We must only learn that independence cannot be gained by a rebellion against the constitution of the universe, or by inverting the laws of life and evolution, but by comprehending them and adapting ourselves to the world in which we live.

The very essence of civilized culture is that we deliberately institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life, devices for detecting their approach and registering their nature, for warding off what is unfavorable or at least for protecting ourselves from its full impact.