Quotes About Thinkers

Most history books focus on the ideas of great thinkers, the bravery of warriors, the charity of saints and the creativity of artists. They have much to tell about the weaving and unravelling of social structures, about the rise and fall of empires, about the discovery and spread of technologies. Yet they say nothing about how all this influenced the happiness and suffering of individuals. This is the biggest lacuna in our understanding of history. We had better start filling it.

By the early 1990s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed "the End of History," confidently asserting that all the big political and economic questions of the past had been settled and that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets, and government welfare services remained the only game in town.

artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Eliminate the thinkers and you control the population. That's the real reason no one knows how to read and why we live in chaos

Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.

Like a stripped and lifeless trunk the Oriental church produces no theologians, thinkers, or savants.

Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of 'postmodernism' I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.

You cry, "give us war!" You are visionaries. When will you become thinkers? The thinkers do not look for power and strength from any of the dreams that constitute military art: tactics, strategies, fortifications, artillery and all that rubbish. They do no believe in war, which is a fantasy; they believe in chemistry, which is a science. They know the way to put victory into an algebraic formula.

At the time I made 'Safe,' I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers.

The thing about nature is that each species does what it's best at. That's why it's all so locked together. I'm certain that at its center is some kind of peace or unity or harmony - the white light people speak of having when they come back from "the dead." And what does our species do best? We construct artificial systems wherein we are mighty predators, or mighty thinkers, or sagacious, benevolent rulers of the universe - allies with God even.

If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.

I have long been moved by Rosa Luxemburg's assertion that 'freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise,' and thus I've been attracted to contrarians, to people whose instinct is to go against the grain of officially accredited views - especially those accredited within their own circle of progressive thinkers. This has its dangers, to be sure.

The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner.

The problem in turning independent thinkers loose on a matter is, they tend to go beyond the theoretical and seize the chance for independent action. Thus

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

Progress in America historically has come from thinkers and ideologues on both the left and the right, but the best of those ideas have been enacted into law through compromise. Now moderation is equated with lacking principles, and compromise with "selling out.

We must inevitably conclude, therefore, that the main influences over Spinoza's thought during his formative years were not those philosophers, such as Descartes, to whom he later devoted his attention, but the Jewish and Muslim writers of earlier centuries, whose thoughts provided the main arguments of contemporary Judaism.

By the time I began my study of physics in the early 1970s, the idea of unifying gravity with the other forces was as dead as the idea of continuous matter. It was a lesson in the foolishness of once great thinkers. Ernst Mach didn't believe in atoms, James Clerk Maxwell believed in the aether, and Albert Einstein searched for a unified-field theory. Life is tough.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

If it happens, the fall of liberal democracy in our own time will not look as it did in the 1920s or 1930s. But it will still require a new elite, a new generation of clercs, to bring it about. The collapse of an idea of the West, or of what is sometimes called "the Western liberal order," will need thinkers, intellectuals, journalists, bloggers, writers, and artists to undermine our current values, and then to imagine the new system to come.

Absurdities exasperated her. At the same time, the slow process of patiently leading recalcitrant thinkers to better thoughts by artful persuasions seemed to her a waste of time--a logical argument, cogently expressed, was surely sufficient to convince, and if it did not convince, then the case might well be hopeless and not worth pursuing.

The dreamers of ideals [?] – socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk – make me physically sick to my stomach. They're idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They're enchanted by life's surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it's beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.

It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.