Philosophy Quotes

When truth threatens hope it is truth we usually sacrifice, often along with those who search for it. -- Roger Scruton

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

I thought Lenin a narrow-minded bigot... He made my blood run cold. -- Bertrand Russell

There is no great genius without some touch of madness. -- Seneca

Time heals what reason cannot. -- Seneca

I won't talk to my colleagues about philosophy... They are too stupid. -- Colin McGinn

Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. -- William James

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers. -- Plato

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution. -- Hannah Arendt

[A] clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well... -- Jerome K. Jerome

Anyone who has had a glimpse of the range and subtlety of the thought of Plato or of a Hegel will long ago have despaired of becoming a philosopher. -- Michael Oakeshott

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man. -- Ernest Becker

Persons who find themselves disenchanted with the whole system of situational obligations in society may seek out those places where reverie is likely to be tolerated. -- Erving Goffman

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. -- H. L. Mencken

It is fatuous to apologise for the bad behaviour of our ancestors. In fact, it is impossible. -- Mary Warnock

It is...easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague. -- C.S. Peirce

'Tis one thing to know virtue, and another to conform the will to it. -- David Hume

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation', which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. -- Erich Fromm

The word 'revolution' is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the labouring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content. -- Simone Weil

Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A man has to be careful when he visits powerful cities as a foreigner, and induces their most promising young men to forsake the company of others, relatives or acquaintances, older or younger, and consort with him on the grounds that his conversation will improve them. -- Plato

Behaviourism is dead. Even fancy, sophisticated philosophical behaviourism really is dead. And the kind of behaviourism that seeks to impose epistemic constraints on the ontology of psychological theories is especially dead. -- Jerry Fodor

You do pay a price for stating it simply, namely it's easier for the professionals to misunderstand it. -- John Searle

Part of the wish to die may be the wish not to become a burdon to our families... I just want that motive to be recognised as a respectable motive. -- Mary Warnock

If you're doing philosophy at all, if you're engaged in the way that ideas work, then it's a male peculiarity to wish to go right up in the air and go round in circles without relating them to anything else. -- Mary Midgley

The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. -- Henry David Thoreau

One of the strengths of philosophy is that it teaches you what an argument is, what is evidence and what is rhetoric. It is abundantly clear from many of the debates in the media about Iraq, for example, that people have no idea how to argue, and this is dangerous. -- Edward Craig

What the bourgeoisie produces above all is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. -- Karl Marx

We learn from history that we do not learn from history. -- G.W.F. Hegel

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell