American Philosopher Quotes

Millions of people profess knowledge of the reality of God, claiming miracles witnessed or voices heard. If what really causes them to believe that they know of God's existence (and that they have had these experiences) is an unconscious, infantile wish for the protection of an all-powerful father-figure, then we have reason to wonder about the epistemic status of their belief.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true.

Bas van Fraassen

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

Jacob Needleman

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

Andrew Bernstein

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

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

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

The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos.

What is it about separation, in any or all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister, so exciting and so repellent?

An argument from probability is like an India-rubber ball; you hit it, and it may fly away, or it may return to you, all the more vigorously the harder you hit.

Edward B. Titchener

It is not unity that we must seek but collective consciousness. In Afrocentricity there is a remarkable surge of consciousness that transcends the current emphasis on unity; this is the next act in our drama.... Consciousness precedes unity.

Molefi Kete Asante

We don't call war hell because it is fought without restraint. It is more nearly right to say that, when certain restraints are passed, the hellishness of war drives us to break with every remaining restraint in order to win. Here is the ultimate tyranny: those who resist aggression are forced to imitate, and perhaps even to exceed, the brutality of the aggressor.

The overwhelming presence of machines and instrumentation must be one of the most salient features of the modern scientific laboratory.... The development of science depends at least as much on new machinery as it does on new ideas.

Many people don't realize the extent to which stories influence our behavior and even shape our culture. Think about how Bible stories teach the fundamentals of religion and rules of conduct. Think of the fables and parables that molded your values. Think of how stories about your national, cultural or family history have shaped your attitudes about yourself and others.

Lawrence Shapiro

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

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?

Different political views, even if they're all liberal, in the sense of supporting liberal constitutional democracy, undoubtedly have some notion of the common good in the form of the means provided to assure that people can make use of their liberties, and the like.

Surely at least some of our logical principles … are far more evident and obvious to us than are any of the empirical generalizations we find in psychology, or in any other of the empirical sciences. Thus, to attempt to explain logic in terms of psychology is to explain the more certain by the less certain. It is, in short, to commit the fallacy of obscurum per obscurius.

How could any woman love a man who wears a cardigan over his pajamas?

Elisabeth Lloyd

If you find yourself ruminating over a hurt and are not ready to forgive, shift to gratitude. Think about all that is good in your life and all that you appreciate.

Stephen G. Post

Guts are important. Your guts are what digest things. But it is your brains that tell you which things to swallow and which not to swallow.

What solidarity we do find exists despite the society, against all its realities, as an unending struggle between the innate decency of man and the innate indecency of the society. Can we imagine how men would behave if this decency could find full release, if society earned the respect, even the love of the individual?

Murray Bookchin

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.

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

Ruth Nanda Anshen

For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous