British Philosopher Quotes

Bertrand Russell

Mary Wollstonecraft

John Stuart Mill

Jeremy Bentham

William of Ockham

Roger Bacon

Iris Murdoch

I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.

Bertrand Russell

Thinking in words, consciousness is behavior, experiment is measurement.

You can only solve a problem which you recognize to be a problem.

R. G. Collingwood

The art of dharma practice requires commitment, technical accomplishment, and imagination. As with all arts, we will fail to realize its full potential if any of these three are lacking. The raw material of dharma practice is ourself and our world, which are to be understood and transformed according to the vision and values of the dharma itself. This is not a process of self- or world- transcendence, but one of self- and world- creation.

Stephen Batchelor (author)

ALL MEANINGFUL KNOWLEDGE IS FOR THE SAKE OF ACTION, AND ALL MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR THE SAKE OF FRIENDSHIP.

The best figurative poetry speaks not to the frivolous intellect, but (if anything does) straight to the heart; and does it better than plain prose. There seems then to be something which is better said with metaphor than without, which goes straighter to its mark by going crooked, and hits its aim exactly by flying off at tangents.

What is best about our lives -the moments when we are, as we would put it, at our happiest- is both pleasant and deeply unpleasant. Happiness is not a feeling; it is a way of being. If we focus on the feelings, we will miss the point.

The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps - who knows? - the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of civilization.

Leszek Kołakowski

Historians of ideas soon learn — to their dismay — that their subject appears to be mathematically dense: between any two people who wrote on the matter there appears to be another.

I loved the opportunity to think about the big questions philosophy asks, and the rigorous way in which philosophy trains the mind to answer them. What is ultimately real? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a necessary being or are all beings contingent? What is knowledge and what can we know? Is there something which is objectively right or wrong, or is everything relative? Most people, at some point, will be confronted with some of these questions and will try to answer them in a more or less informal way. Philosophy has been tackling them over the centuries in a formal, rigorous way, engaging in a deep, fascinating, and exciting conversation which continues nowadays.

Maria Rosa Antognazza

How far our position is a minority one will differ from person to person here. If we are against factory farms, we are morally condemning widespread and perfectly legal practices involving perhaps the majority of the human community. If we are vegetarians, we hold a position which is very much a minority one. If we are pretty radical anti-vivisectionists, we also hold what seems to be a minority position, involving as it does a radical criticism of the law and the establishment of this country.

Timothy Sprigge

The failure to take organization seriously is perhaps but another consequence of the rapid development of physics and chemistry as compared to other sciences, and the consequent dazzling effect this had on biological vision.

Joseph Henry Woodger

And common sense today assumes that it is the outer world that is real and permanent, while the inner experience we call consciousness, or subjectivity, or our own or our self, is a fleeting unreality to which it somehow gives birth from time to time.

Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.

Simon Blackburn

However far back we may be able to trace the - so to speak - internal history of the Universe, there can be no question of arguing that this or that external origin is either probable or improbable. We do not have, and we necessarily could not have, experience of other Universes to tell us that Universes, or Universes with these particular features, are the work of Gods, or of Gods of this or that particular sort.

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.

For Kant, the predisposition to good (like Calvin's 'seed of goodness') is in one way more fundamental to us than the overlying propensity to evil, and in one way it is less fundamental. The predisposition to good is more fundamental because it is essential to us; we cannot lose it without ceasing to be human. The propensity to evil is in that way less fundamental, because we can lose it, and indeed we should lose it, without ceasing to be human. On the other hand, the propensity to evil is in a different way more fundamental. It is our root maxim when we are born.

There is, I think, nothing in the world more futile than the attempt to find out how a task should be done when one has not yet decided what the task is.

Alexander Meiklejohn

The scientist is like a child with a toy which he has taken apart. He understands now how it works, but not all the king's horses and all the king's men can put together that unsightly heap of torn flesh and dissected organs which was once a living frog or embryo chicken.

We've got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour. The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc to the free movement of labour and capital. Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first.

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman

Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists.

Stephen R. L. Clark

This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness.

John Cowper Powys

If a work of art is placed before me, I believe I can enjoy it; but I do not overlook the fact, that Art is one thing, another thing Amusement; and that people do like amusements, and will run after it.

George Henry Lewes

Let us, my dear contemporaries, arise above such narrow prejudices. If wisdom be desirable on its own account, if virtue, to deserve the name, must be founded on knowledge, let us endeavour to strengthen our minds by reflection till our heads become a balance for our hearts...

Mary Wollstonecraft

The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / 'social democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction.