Quotes by Women Philosophers

Simone de Beauvoir

Mary Wollstonecraft

Rosa Luxemburg

Hannah Arendt

Ayn Rand

Maria Montessori

Teresa of Ávila

My studies gave me only a very superficial knowledge of philosophy but sharpened my interest in it. I benefited greatly from being a teacher—that is, from being able to spend a great deal of time reading, writing and educating myself.

Simone de Beauvoir

Looking to biology to explain the low prevalence of eating disorders among men is like looking to genetics to explain why nonsmokers do not get lung cancer as often as smokers.

I have been hearing for years and years about how the financial services sector pays such exorbitant wages because the people who work there are so immensely talented that they are cheap at $50 million a year. I never particularly bought that line before. But I never imagined that all those Masters of the Universe would do quite this badly. If we had paid them $50 million a year to go far, far away and leave our financial system alone, it would have been a bargain.

According to Luther everyone judges everyone. This is because there's an intense desire to be judging. Then those of us on the masochistic side of things want to be judged. Thus we publish. We teach. We learn. We beg to be judged and decimated.

Curiously, the unexpected complexity that has been discovered in nature has not led to a slowdown in the progress of science, but on the contrary to the emergence of new conceptual structures that now appear as essential to our understanding of the physical world - the world that includes us.

Isabelle Stengers

What sort of god would deliberately create a world in which his creatures must eat one another to live?

There are here two assumptions about 'evaluations ', which I will call assumption (1) and assumption (2). Assumption (1) is that some individual may, without logical error, base his beliefs about matters of value entirely on premises which no one else would recognise as giving any evidence at all. Assumption (2) is that, given the kind of statement which other people regard as evidence for an evaluative conclusion, he may refuse to draw the conclusion because this does not count as evidence for him.

Now suppose that the clue experiences that can correct the illusion become for some reason increasingly scarce – perhaps because the dominant story itself brings about their elimination! Then the illusion might go on for a very long time, might have to result in real catastrophe, before anyone realizes anything is wrong.

For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.

Anne Conway (philosopher)

What is crucial is the provision of opportunities for telling all the diverse stories, for interpreting membership as well as ethnicity, for making inescapable the braids of experience woven into the fabric of America's plurality.

The claim "I deserve my income," as applied to an individual's pretax income in free market economies, has considerable intuitive force. If true, it suggests a powerful moral claim against taxation for redistributive purposes, on the intuitively plausible supposition that a just economic order ought to ensure that people get what they morally deserve.
But, however intuitive these claims may be, they are unjustified. In two of his important works of political economy, The Constitution of Liberty, and Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek explained why free market prices cannot, and should not, track claims of individual moral desert.

Elizabeth S. Anderson

The philosopher does not just 'play' with metaphors: his play is of a 'formidable seriousness', for it is designed to oppose modernity's hatred for art, to obliterate precisely the opposition between play and seriousness, dream and reality.

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

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.

Tea seems to tenderize cheap cuts of beef. After cooking chuck, boiling beef and brisket (I even mixed rib eye, which is ever so cheap, and it's great) I have decided that the tannic acid in the tea is what tenderizes beef!

Surely binationalism is not love, but there is, we might say, a necessary and impossible attachment that makes a mockery of identity, an ambivalence that emerges from the decentering of the nationalist ethos and that forms the basis of a permanent ethical demand.

We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion what is and what is not their 'proper sphere.' The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to.

Harriet Taylor Mill

I think there is at least one moral theory of respectable lineage and good independent credentials that can accommodate such fairly minimal intuitions about us and animals. This is the theory Hume offers us. I do not consider Hume a forerunner of utilitarianism, and therefore what I shall go on to say in defense of Hume is not intended as a defense of any version of utilitarianism. I see Hume to be much closer to Aristotle than to Mill, to be offering us a theory about human virtues, not a theory about utility maximization and the duties that might involve.

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

Elisabeth Lloyd

A system is said to be coherent if every fact in the system is related every other fact in the system by relations that are not merely conjunctive. A deductive system affords a good example of a coherent system.

You ought to make every effort to free yourselves even from venial sin, and to do what is most perfect.

Teresa of Ávila

To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

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

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

Rebecca Goldstein