Famous Quotes & Sayings

Steven Pinker

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.

Steven Pinker

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

Steven Pinker

Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels... Our minds evolved... to solve problems, [not]... to answer any question we are capable of asking.

Susan Howatch

It is an author's primary duty to entertain. Sling out all the philosophical terms, but keep the reader turning the page.

Sun Ra

I'm not a minister, I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a politician, I'm in another category.

Sun Myung Moon

Anyone can keep going in an easy situation, but do you have a philosophy which can enable you to meet the worst hardship?

Stuart Chase

For the individual, as I can testify, a brief grounding in semantics, besides making philosophy unreadable, makes unreadable most political speeches, classical economic theory, after-dinner oratory, diplomatic notes, newspaper editorials, treatises on pedagogics and education, expert financial comment, dissertations on money and credit, accounts of debates, and Great Thoughts from Great Thinkers in general. You would be surprised at the amount of time this saves.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

That's how it happens, livin life by the drop.

Steven Weinberg

How then did we come to the "standard model"? And how has it supplanted other theories, like the steady state model? It is a tribute to the essential objectivity of modern astrophysics that this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data.

Ridley Scott

Yes, obviously, there's this degree of wanting people to accept other people faiths and philosophies.

Raymond Carver

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

Sammy Hagar

I had been reading this book about Zen Koan philosophy, and it was talking about the right here and the right now, and how important it is, and I was really trying to get there in my life.

Tariq Ramadan

We have to reconcile ourselves with philosophical questions in every field. Every field should be open to inquiry and knowledge.

Tariq Ramadan

Unfortunately there are some trends that are changing this but you don't have for example as strict and narrow understanding of the relationship between men and women. And then there is the philosophy we have to extract in the relationship between text and culture.

Tariq Ramadan

We must re-center philosophy within our frame of reference which I think is the way to deal with it.

Tariq Ramadan

The philosophy of fasting calls upon us to know ourselves, to master ourselves, and to discipline ourselves the better to free ourselves. To fast is to identify our dependencies, and free ourselves from them.

T. S. Eliot

Philosophy: a purple bullfinch in a lilac tree.

T. S. Eliot

A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.

T. S. Eliot

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

Sydney J. Harris

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

Sydney J. Harris

Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy.

Scott Westerfeld

I'm not the one going for a biology degree. I'm just a philosophy major who eats people.

Scott Adams

My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser.

Jostein Gaarder

It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.

Jostein Gaarder

When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.

Jostein Gaarder

As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.

Jostein Gaarder

Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.

Jostein Gaarder

Let me put it more precisely: The ability to give birth is a natural characteristic. In the same way, everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.

Jostein Gaarder

Wisest is she who knows she does not know.

Jostein Gaarder

... the only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder...

Jostein Gaarder

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales

Joss Whedon

'The Dark Knight,' for me, has the same problem that every other 'Batman' movie has. It's not about Batman. I think Heath Ledger is just phenomenal and the character of the Joker is beautifully written. He has a particular philosophy that he carries throughout the movie. He has one of the best bad guy schemes.

Konrad Adenauer

All parts of the human body get tired eventually - except the tongue.