Famous Quotes & Sayings

Kenny Smith

Indisputably we live in a shaped reality, an artificialism. Most people who grasp this are thinking only at a consumer-level, of the "things" they like and need and feel impelled to acquire. But our societal and political arrangements are just as much manipulations of game-pieces and rules as is any Atari or Sega product. The subliminal psychology that drives people to become addicted to games, not to be able to see over the edges of their labyrinths, is transferable to any field whatsoever.

Kenny Smith

Most people traffic in abstractions and generalizations because they are grossly incompetent at culturing their intuition or powers of evidency, refining it to grasp the Thisness (Haecceitas) of what is before them. Thinking is like a Stradivarius that has more potential variations in how it is played than any human can finitely perform or capture.

Kenny Smith

A vital part of philosophizing is learning to trust one's own intuitivist intelligence, getting one's center of gravity back between one's feet. In our culture-so outer-directed, "objective" or extraverted-this is already heresy. This is self-mastering thinking, centered in what has been well-tested as certainties: autarkia or self-rule.

Kenny Smith

Intellect is merely a narrow and highly specific kind of thing that we DO, but our immediacy relates us to what we naturally and essentially ARE, the actualities of our full-dimensional existence.

Kenny Smith

Some form of gnosis or immediacy is attached to all thinking as its root-form or primitive origination; every act of thinking has this passive derivation, this coming-into-being of thinking not out of nothing (as it likes to imagine) but out of some unthinkable something. But the most self-abstractivist or self-reductivist kind of thinking cannot tolerate even the notion (much less the traumatic experience or confrontation) of an incurable pathos, a weakness or blind-spot, within consciousness. The very idea is an insult to the autonomy or self-determinability of ego/will/reason.

Kenny Smith

As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).

Kenny Smith

The problems of human subjectivity replicate themselves at many different scales, like the overtones and undertones in a stringed instrument striking ghost-intervals up and down into infinity. This is not Hegel's ingenuity, it is his responsiveness to the organic structure in us that echoes itself throughout the whole architecture.

Kenny Smith

When academics claim a topic is obsolete, they mean merely they are tired of flogging it with their cliches.

Kenny Smith

The ideological are individuals ultimately swamped by the complexities of modern life and political and economic relations; they have deliberately attached themselves to some caricatural maven like Falwell or Limbaugh who speaks to their manipulable pathos. The gulf between such individuals' education or intellectual competence or information and the actual issues of our times is simply too great. They were bred to be culture-media for false consciousness, junkies who crawl on their bellies across broken glass for another hit of "clarifying wisdom" from some ideological Pope.

Kenny Smith

The anorexic is the fuse nakedly exposed to the direct power of modern media, a psyche whose wiring has no insulation. The anorexic is an analog to the ideologue, who is likewise devoid of common sense, independent ego, culture, intuitive intelligence, etc.: all the ideologue has to orient himself by is the formalist or abstractivist directives inlaid in modern mass-culture. Both are forms of the True Believer, minds in whom factors of self-active life are reduced to negligibility and pathos reigns.

Kenny Smith

Bourgeois society, rife with an atomism or monadism of secluded egos, is profoundly uncomfortable with topics of domination just because of the rift between how it sees itself (Kantian autonomism) and how it actually exists (pathetic prole-culture).

Kenny Smith

Education in philosophy is energy speaking to energy, a higher perspective of spirit that is trying to awaken its next natural generation to something beyond the stupid appearances of things.

Ken Robinson

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

Kelly Hoppen

My philosophy has always remained the same, it's about creating calm balanced environments based on Eastern cultures, ie order and creation of harmony. How people feel in a space is as important as the way it looks, one can't be without the other to succeed.

Kathy Ireland

The only thing Martha and I have in common is that we both used to model. Martha Stewart is extremely talented. Her designs are picture perfect. Our philosophy is life is messy, and rather than being afraid of those messes we design products that work the way we live.

Margaret Thatcher

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Margaret Thatcher

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.

Margaret Cho

My philosophy is, "murder the rapist in your mind so you stop killing yourself." I've seen, in my lifetime, that sexual abuse has turned into self-abuse. When I kill the rapist inside of me, I will stop killing myself.

Mark Twain

It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.

Leonardo DiCaprio

We must set an example now and move environmentalism from being the philosophy of a passionate minority ... to a way of life that automatically integrates ecology into governmental policy and normal living standards.

Leonardo da Vinci

He who despises painting has no love for the philosophy in nature.

Leonardo da Vinci

Oh! Speculators on things, boast not of knowing the things that nature ordinarily brings about; but rejoice if you know the end of those things which you yourself device.

Paul Ricoeur

There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.

Patrick O'Brian

You are to consider that a certain melancholy and often a certain irascibility accompany advancing age: indeed it might be said that advancing age equals ill-temper. On reaching the middle years a man perceives that he is no longer able to do certain things, that what looks he may have had are deserting him, that he has a ponderous great belly, and that however much he may yet burn he is no longer attractive to women; and he rebels. Fortitude, resignation and philosophy are of more value than any pills, red, white or blue.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

the blessings of matrimony, like those of poverty, belong rather to philosophy than reality.

Leroy Hood

My fundamental philosophy is that you owe it to society to transfer to them any knowledge you have that might be useful.

Leon Trotsky

The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.

Lauren Oliver

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

Larry Wall

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

Lafcadio Hearn

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

L. Neil Smith

The trouble is with socialism , which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual and his rights as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.

P. J. O'Rourke

People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.

Oscar Wilde

What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read.