Famous Quotes & Sayings

Kenny Smith

There is a form of poetic and esthetic and moral genius necessary to make philosophical issues truly incandesce for students, and even though I indeed had some world-class professors myself when I went through the curriculum, I rarely saw such gnosic or concretist/poetic passion among them. I am not speaking of broad histrionics or melodramatic delivery, but rather a moral investment of concern, of loving delight and pathos in exposing one's consciousness to the full horrific and magnificent implications of the materials.

Margaret Thatcher

Why do you climb philosophical hills? Because they are worth climbing . . . There are no hills to go down unless you start from the top.

Mark Twain

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

Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity is called the religion of pity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science, section 108

Friedrich Nietzsche

For men are not equal: thus speaks justice.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Antichrist, Section 7

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153

Friedrich Nietzsche

Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Frank Zappa

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

Fred Hoyle

On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In every age and every generation, men have envisioned a promised land. Some may have envisioned it with the wrong ideology, with the wrong philosophical presupposition. But men in every generation thought in terms of some promised land.

Protagoras

Man is the measure of all things.

Jean Toomer

We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.

Grimes

Just because something might not have a deep philosophical meaning doesn't mean it's not important or relevant.

Goodluck Jonathan

The argument about zoning and the presidency of Nigeria is like the philosophical argument of the egg or the hen. Who is older through the evolutionary process, who came first?

Ray Bradbury

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Niccolo Machiavelli

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.

Niccolo Machiavelli

I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

Niccolo Machiavelli

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

Niccolo Machiavelli

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

Niccolo Machiavelli

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

Niccolo Machiavelli

One can generally say this about men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, simulators and deceivers, avoiders of danger, greedy for gain; and while you work for their good they are completely yours, offering you their blood, their property, their lives, and their sons when danger is far away; but when it comes nearer to you, they turn away.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces.

Nelson Rockefeller

The fundamental question for the United States is how it can cooperate to help meet the basic needs of the people of the hemisphere despite the philosophical disagreements it may have with the nature of particular regimes. It must seek pragmatic ways to help people without necessarily embracing their governments. It should recognize that diplomatic relations are merely practical conveniences and not measures of moral judgment.

Noam Chomsky

The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.

Ted Cruz

If we look at it more from a philosophical standpoint, these foundations of atheism and secular humanism believe that you are your own God. That leads us to something that unfortunately has crept into many churches across America, and it is what I call the Social Gospel. The social gospel, that could creep into something that is called Liberation Theology, which is a mixture of leftist, pseudo-Christianity with Marxism.

Theodore Sturgeon

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

Joseph Stalin

Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.