American Philosopher Quotes

What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?

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

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

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

Would you reach the infinite? Then enter into finite things, working out all that they contain.

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.

Josiah Royce
Josiah Royce
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.

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

Jacob Needleman
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.

The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human
being from having one.

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.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God.

Mary Daly
Mary Daly
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.

Every time we turn to Christ in faith it is like a moment of Sabbath, a little foretaste of eternal rest and glory. The gift of that moment lies not in what we do but what we receive. It is the holy time set aside to receive the greatest gift of God ever has to give, which is himself, in his own beloved Son.

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.

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

Thus a eukaryotic cell may be thought of as an empire directed by a republic of sovereign chromosomes in the nucleus. The chromosomes preside over the outlying cytoplasm in which formerly independent but now subject and degenerate prokaryotes carry out a variety of specialized service functions.

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

Every nursing mother, in the midst of her little dependent brood, has far more right to whine, sulk or scold, as temperament dictates, because beefsteak and coffee are not prepared for her and exactly to her taste, than any man ever had or ever can have during the present stage of human evolution.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
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.)

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

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
Nicholas Murray Butler
From my reading of Gandhi I had learned how some people in India regard eating cow as unspeakably repulsive. I realized I felt the same way about cats and dogs: I could never eat them. Were cows so different from cats and dogs that there were two moral standards, one that applies to cows, another that applies to cats and dogs? Were pigs so different? Were any of the animals I ate so different?

Tom Regan
Tom Regan
Any individual can be, in time, what he earnestly desires to be, if he but sets his face steadfastly in the direction of that one thing, and bring all his powers to bear upon its attainment.

The only proper role of government, according to libertarians, is that of the protector of the citizen against aggression by other individuals. The government, of course, should never initiate aggression; its proper role is as the embodiment of the retaliatory use of force against anyone who initiates its use.

John Hospers
John Hospers