Quotes About Thinkers

From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how to exploit falsehood and calumny. Their very existence is based on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community and not a race. And what a race. One of the greatest thinkers of mankind has branded them for all time with a statement that is profoundly and precisely true: he called them 'The great master of the lie.

Whence will the revolution come? How will it announce its coming? No one can answer these questions. The future is hidden. But those who watch and think do not misinterpret the signs: workers and exploiters, revolutionists and conservatives, thinkers and men of action, all feel that a revolution is at our doors.

was a melancholy introvert who declined to join in philosophical discussions.)   The Concord circle of sympathetically-minded thinkers, writers, and social activists became known as Transcendentalists. What exactly is Transcendentalism? That's the question Emerson set out to answer at Boston's Masonic Temple in 1842. In addition to defining his own philosophy, this lecture planted the seeds of the modern self-help and personal development movements.

It is true that there have been other religions with millions of adherents, but it is also true that the existence and progress of the Church is something unique in history to say nothing of the fact that Christianity has attracted to itself the profoundest thinkers of the human race, and is in no way hindered by the ever-advancing tide of human knowledge. G. Thomas

La pasarela de personajes que desfilaron durante estos agitados años es fascinante: Voltaire, el escritor que revolucionó las mentes; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, el suizo que habló de un nuevo pacto social; Montesquieu, el barón que defendía la separación de los poderes y la de los negros109; Georges-Jacques

Mass production of books ended the Church's monopoly on Scripture, as well as on other forms of information. The wider availability of books reduced the cost of literacy and thus multiplied the number of thinkers who were in a position to offer their own opinions on important subjects, particularly theological subjects

If one of the reasons for uniting into commonwealths is the protection of property, and if property is to be protected less by power as such than by theater, then societies become acutely dependent on their artists-what Plato called poietai: the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original thinkers whatsoever.

Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society's heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences to their triumph.

While societal thinkers may not overlook the importance of poiesis, or creative activity, neither may they underestimate its danger, for the poietai are the ones most likely to remember what has been forgotten—that society is a species of culture.

Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots

Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job, aren't we?

The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That's part of their trouble.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.

when a great war has cut off the young men of a nation it never can be told thereafter what losses of scholars, poets, thinkers and great designers the country and the world have suffered.

No person, no place, and no thing has any power over us, for 'we' are the only thinkers in our mind. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our minds, we will find it in our lives.

Philosophy is the history of philosophy.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that philosophy went downhill after Democritus and did not recover until the Renaissance.

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers

We need fewer philosophies and more philosophers.

Some positive thinkers get consistent powerful results almost deserving of a scientific formula

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true.

Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously.