Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Sowell

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

Thomas Sowell

Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.

Thomas Reid

We find sects and parties in most branches of science; and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue. Sophistry has been more effectually excluded from mathematics and natural philosophy than from other sciences. In mathematics it had no place from the beginning; mathematicians having had the wisdom to define accurately the terms they use, and to lay down, as axioms, the first principles on which their reasoning is grounded. Accordingly, we find no parties among mathematicians, and hardly any disputes.

Thomas Reid

A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.

Thomas Reid

Every theory in philosophy, which is built on pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay.

Robert McNamara

Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.

Sarah Dessen

I looked at the sweatshirt again. "'You swim' is a philosophy?" He shrugged. "Better than 'you sink', right?

Sandra Day O'Connor

I'm not on the court anymore, so no use looking for my philosophy. If somebody's waiting for that, they can wait for another justice.

Roseanne Barr

Judaism is one of the last of the world's matrilineal philosophies. Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don't spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does. They are easy prey.

Roseanne Barr

Eat as much as you'd like. My philosophy has always been that all women desire to be as fat as myself but just have a great fear of doing so. Because they think they won't get any men, but you will. You'll get more men, and better men.

Ronnie Montrose

My philosophy is, honestly never collected anything that I don't play. I know a lot of people that collect guitars, but for me, I want instruments that I play. And if I don't play them, I don't' want to have them sitting in a closet collecting dust.

Roger Scruton

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.

Roger Scruton

The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.

Roger Scruton

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

Roger Ebert

Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy - the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

Roger Ebert

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

Rod Stewart

Life is so brief and time is a thief when you're undecided.

Robert Trout

The myth that the founding of American Republic was based on the philosophy of John Locke could only have been maintained, because the history of Leibniz's influence was suppressed.

Robert Trout

The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians.

Robert Trout

The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.

Robert Sheckley

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

Satish Kumar

All the big problems of the world today are routed in the philosophy of separateness and dualism.

Satish Kumar

Before the scientific rationalism took hold of our minds and before we became succumbed to a materialistic worldview, the Western philosophy was holistic and relational, and even now there are many scientists in the West seeing things totally interconnected.

Sarah McLachlan

I've got to live my life the way I feel is right for me. Might not be right for you, but it's right for me.

Sandra Postel

Today's water institutions-the policies and laws, government agencies and planning and engineering practices that shape patterns of water use-are steeped in a supply-side management philosophy no longer appropriate to solving today's water problems.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The annals of the French Revolution prove that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many.... The light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude.

Robert Greene

Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.

Robert B. Laughlin

But the need for conflict to expose prejudice and unclear reasoning, which is deeply embedded in my philosophy of science, has its origin in these debates.

Robert Anton Wilson

I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.

Robert Anton Wilson

...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

Richard M. Nixon

Television is to news as bumperstickers are to philosophy.

Richard Rorty

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

Richard Rorty

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.