Philosopher Quotes

Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

Capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible.

Since money belongs to the community … it would seem that the community may control it as it wills, and therefore may make as much profit from alteration as it likes, and treat money as its own property.

There was a Socratic style of life (which the Cynics were to imitate), and the Socratic dialogue was an exercise which brought Socrates' interlocutor to put himself in question, to take care of himself, and to make his soul as beautiful and wise as possible.

What is the most effective, practical way of raising the wealth of nations? What causes wealth? I have come to think that the dream of democratic socialism is inferior to the dream of democratic capitalism, and that the latter's superiority in actual practice is undeniable.

When writers with the reputation of intelligent and perceptive critics of human life teach us, day in and day out, that vileness is distinguishable from decency only in respect of being less hypocritical, … it is small wonder that ordinary people come to disbelieve in any objective principles by appeal to which one form of conduct can be regarded as morally better than another.

R. W. K. Paterson

The deep satisfaction found in scientific work, akin to the delight derived from genuine art, is one of the fundamental human emotions which is highly intensified by personal contact with the creative mind.

Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider

He best honors God who makes his intellect as like God as possible.

Quintus Sextius

I recall an incident involving the late George Stigler at a conference in Spain in the 1980s. Hearing that I had written a book on reason and natural law, Stigler started to ridicule reason, going so far as to say that there is as much reason in a monkey's antics as in any human act. At that point I asked him whether he was trying to tell me something about how he wrote his books; he gave me a blank stare and stormed out of the room.

For the institutions of the European Union are at present incomplete. A European Senate is badly needed to complete them. By creating an upper chamber in the European parliament, a new bridge could be built between national political classes, which retain democratic legitimacy, and the decision-making process in Brussels. Such a Senate should be recruited by indirect election from exisiting national parliaments.

Larry Siedentop

Man is the work of nature: he exists in nature: he is submitted to her laws: he cannot deliver himself from them: nor step beyond them, even in thought.

Baron d'Holbach

The most delightful of all music, that of your own praises.

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

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?

Matthew Crawford

If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous t otake ourselves so seriously.

Cultivate truth, good faith, experience, cleverness, sociability, and industry.

Pittacus of Mytilene

Whatever parent gives his children good instruction and sets them at the same time a bad example, may be considered as bringing them food in one hand and poison in the other.

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

The Senses place before us the Characters of the Book of Nature; but these convey no knowledge to us, till we have discovered the Alphabet by which they are to be read.

William Whewell

Remote fountains are of little help to nearby fires.

God does not work by only one method, paint in only one color, play in only one key, nor does he make only one star shine onto the earth...

Eberhard Arnold

Morality cannot be based on religion. If anything, the opposite is partly true, for nothing can be God unless he or it is an object worthy of worship and it is our own moral insight that must tell us if anything at all could possibly be
worthy of worship.

The Aegean sea washes Greece on two sides: first, the side that faces towards the east and stretches from Sunium, towards the north as far as the Thermaean Gulf and Thessaloniceia, a Macedonian city...; and secondly, the side that faces towards the south, I mean the Macedonian country, extending from Thessaloniceia as far as the Strymon.

The time has gone by when the intelligent public needs to be reminded of the practical utility of science, or of the fact that the investigation of any problem, however apparently remote from everyday life, may be fraught with the most valuable consequences.

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

Jacob Needleman