American Philosopher Quotes

Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.

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 fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the ;thesis that the exercise of this right redounds to the general good.

Ralph Barton Perry

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.

Terrorism is a word with little content - it is a label for brutalities committed by 'the enemy', and from which one's own acts of destruction are exempted. It is an inchoate and emotionally laden concept, a semantic mirror of our dishonesty and a repository for everything about war that we would like to disavow. Making a sharp distinction between war and terrorism is at best a self-deceptive game.

David Livingstone Smith

Nudity quickly becomes unremarkable when generally practiced.

Martha Nussbaum

Even as the cell is the unit of the organic body, so the family is the unit of society.

Ruth Nanda Anshen

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

As I see it, creative achievement is the very heart of the human enterprise... The destiny of man, of all men and of each man, is that he is condemned to invent what he will be - condemned if he is fearful but blessed if he welcomes the great adventure. We are responsible in the last analysis, not simply for what we are, but for what we will become; and that is a source of either high excitement or distress.

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!

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

Modern industrial design has advanced at a rapid pace during the last ten years. Its successes are no longer confined to objects which, like automobiles and airplanes, are themselves the product of new conditions. Modern design has also begun to conquer the traditional arts, and the feeling for abstract form, first expressed in our time in the works of Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Duchamps-Villon in Europe, or Stieglitz, Benton, and Storrs for example in the United States, has finally entered architecture and the decorative arts.

The ability to imagine relations is one of the most indispensable conditions of all precise thinking. No subject can be named in the investigation of which it is not imperatively needed; but it can be nowhere else so thoroughly acquired as in the study of mathematics.

John Fiske (philosopher)

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

Andrew Bernstein

High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)

Robert C. Solomon

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

Rebecca Goldstein

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."

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

It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose.

Walter Kaufmann

There is no such thing as the probability of four aces in one hand, or the probability of anything else. Given all the relevant data which there are to be known, everything is either certainly true or certainly false.

Clarence Irving Lewis

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

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

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

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

Observation and experiment, without a rational hypothesis, is like a man groping at objects at random with his eyes shut.

Henry Philip Tappan

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.