Simon Critchley Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

For me, philosophy is an activity of thought that is common to human beings. Human beings at their best.

Simon Critchley
Shore up the mean with reverence and terror. But never banish terror from the gates of the state. The stronger the fear, the stronger the reverence for the just, the stronger your country's wall and the city's safety.

Simon Critchley
In relation to the question of hope, I think the only hope we have is hope against hope. We hope for a better world. But of course we can do better than just hope.

Simon Critchley
Now, if laughter is proper to the human being, then the human being who does not laugh invites the charge of inhumanity, or at least makes us somewhat suspicious.

Simon Critchley
Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so.

Simon Critchley
For me philosophy begins with these experiences of disappointment: a disappointment at the level of what I would think of as "meaning," namely that, given that there is no God, what is the meaning of life? And, given that we live in an unjust world, how are we to bring about justice?

Simon Critchley
Philosophy isn't programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting the nihilism of the present by making, creating, affirming. By going on.

Simon Critchley
The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility.

Simon Critchley
There are two forms of disappointment that interest me: religious and political disappointment. Religious disappointment flows from the realization that religious belief is not an option for us. Political disappointment flows from the fact that there is injustice - that we live in a world that is radically unjust and violent, where might seems to equal right, where the poor are exploited by the rich, etc.

Simon Critchley
If I had a religious experience, what I know for sure is that I would stop doing philosophy and would start doing religion, teaching classes in religion, preaching in a local church. That is fine and noble activity. But I do not feel entitled to engage in it. So for me philosophy is my fate.

Simon Critchley
I think that when people are at their best, when they are thinking, reflecting, cogitating, then they are doing philosophy. So I don't see philosophy as an academic enterprise.

Simon Critchley
We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality.

Simon Critchley
The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.

Simon Critchley
When the animal becomes human, the effect is pleasingly benign and we laugh outloud, "Okay come clean now. This isn't really about hunting, is it?" But when the human becomes animal, the effect is disgusting, and if we laugh at all, then it is what Beckett calls the "mirthless laugh", which laughs at that which is unhappy.

Simon Critchley
Philosophy teaches us to look at the world again. It brings out at a theoretical level what all plain, common, ordinary people, in a sense, know already.

Simon Critchley
There are lots of stories about how philosophy begins. Some people claim it begins in wonder; some people claim it begins in worry. I claim it begins in disappointment.

Simon Critchley