Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas B. Macaulay

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Thomas Hobbes

He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.

Thomas Hobbes

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Thomas Hobbes

Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.

Tim Berners-Lee

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

Thomas Frank

Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.

Victor Hugo

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.

Victor Hugo

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

Tariq Ramadan

The philosophical connection between the Islamic world and the West is much closer than I thought. Doubt did not begin with Descartes. We have this construction today that the West and Islam are entirely separate worlds. This is wrong.

Stanley Fish

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

Stanley Kubrick

You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point.

Soren Kierkegaard

Who is also aware of the tremendous risk involved in faith - when he nevertheless makes the leap of faith - this [is] subjectivity ... at its height.

Soren Kierkegaard

If the ethical - that is, social morality- is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.

Tom Robbins

I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.

Tom Robbins

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.

Tom Robbins

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.

Stanislaw Lem

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.

Stanislaw Lem

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.

Stanislaw Lem

We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.

Serj Tankian

In terms of political things, I think it's important to be more direct in terms of political statements. I think in terms of philosophical and things that you plant things and see them grow lyrically or musically, it's okay to be subtle.

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.

Sherman Hemsley

I'm proud to be from Philadelphia.

Tom DeLonge

Angels and Airwaves is a complete, pure reflection of who I am. The philosophy, the spiritualism, the esotericism, the idea of hope and space and the themes about life and grandeur that's all me.

Socrates

Get married, in any case. If you happen to get a good mate, you will be happy; if a bad one, you will become philosophical, which is a fine thing in itself.

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.

Max Black

No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.

P. J. O'Rourke

A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.

Plato

Until philosophers hold power, neither states nor individuals will have rest from trouble.

Plato

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

Plato

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

Plato

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

Plato

Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.

Plato

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.