Famous Quotes & Sayings

Theodore Roosevelt

The decisions of the courts on economic and social questions depend on their economic and social philosophy.

Theodor Adorno

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.

Theodor Adorno

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.

Theodor Adorno

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

Theodor Adorno

It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

Theodor Adorno

By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

Thelma Ritter

We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How's that for a bit of homespun philosophy?

Terry McMillan

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.

Terry Pratchett

Demons were like genies or philosophy professors - if you didn't word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.

Terry Pratchett

Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.

Margaret Mead

A society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice.

Michael Faraday

There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle

Michael Bloomberg

Neither party has God on its side, a monopoly on good ideas, or a lock on any single fiscal, social, or moral philosophy.

Melissa Etheridge

I could have been you, you could have been me. One small change that shapes your destiny.

Melissa Marr

Choose to be happy. It is what we have all done.

James Carville

I ran races a long time ago. I won't be going for time. My philosophy is to start slow and taper.

Milan Kundera

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

Mike Lee

We ought to have more people who believe in constitutionall y limited government. We have to have more people come to Congress with that mindset. I think we can make this a better place, if, when elections happen, we support candidates who share that philosophy.

Marcel Proust

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

Marcel Proust

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

Joseph Auslander

This is an extremely ambitious book. In addition to science and mathematics, Byers brings to bear insights from literature, philosophy, religion, history, anthropology, medicine, and psychology. The Blind Spot breaks new ground, and represents a major step forward in the philosophy of science. The book is also a page-turner, which is rare for this topic.

Joseph Addison

Our forefathers looked upon nature with more reverence and horror, before the world was enlightened by learning and philosophy, and loved to astonish themselves with the apprehensions of witchcraft, prodigies, charms, and inchantments. There was not a village in England that had not a ghost in it, the church-yards were all haunted, every large common had a circle of fairies belonging to it, and there was scarce a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit.

Joseph Addison

Thy steady temper, Portius, Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Cæsar, In the calm lights of mild philosophy.

Joseph Addison

A state of temperance, sobriety and justice without devotion is a cold, lifeless, insipid condition of virtue, and is rather to be styled philosophy than religion.

Lance Burton

That's kind of what we have here. I think we've just grown apart, we have different philosophies, and we're going in different directions,

Lisa Unger

Others of us are lost. We're forever seeking. We torture ourselves with philosophies and ache to see the world. We question everything, even our own existence. We ask a lifetime of questions and are never satisfied with the answers because we don't recognize anyone as an authority to give them. We see life and the world as an enormous puzzle that we might never understand, that our questions might go unanswered until the day we die, almost never occurs to us. And when it does, it fills us with dread.

John Stuart Mill

Among the facts of the universe to be accounted for, it may be said, is Mind; and it is self evident that nothing can have produced Mind but Mind.

John Stuart Mill

The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be booted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle.

John Stuart Mill

The ends of scientific classification are best answered, when the objects are formed into groups respecting which a greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important, than could be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be distributed. ... A classification thus formed is properly scientific or philosophical, and is commonly called a Natural, in contradistinction to a Technical or Artificial, classification or arrangement.

John Stuart Mill

To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality

John Stuart Mill

The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.