Quotes About Thinkers

Pride is no respecter of persons. The serious thinkers may be humble, and the careless mystics may be arrogant.

Books destined to form future thinkers take too much time to write, and when written come, in general, too slowly into notice and repute, to be relied on for subsistence.

Although, however, Hobbes's theory of Predication, according to the well-known remark of Leibnitz, and the avowal of Hobbes himself, 32 renders truth and falsity completely arbitrary, with no standard but the will of men, it must not be concluded that either Hobbes, or any of the other thinkers who have in the main agreed with him, did in fact consider the distinction between truth and error as less real, or attached less importance to it, than other people.

Our moral faculty, according to all those of its interpreters who are entitled to the name of thinkers, supplies us only with the general principles of moral judgements; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive faculty; and must be looked to for the abstract doctrines of morality, not for perception of it in the concrete.

All thinkers are failures of action who avenge their failure by means of concepts.

My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.

The 21st century - and the atheists - needs the presence of religion, just as religion must deal with the real challenges and the thinkers of the day in order to sharpen the conscience and the intelligence of those who study the timeless sacred texts in a spirit of responding to the questions of their time.

Among the most ancient Greek thinkers, it is Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek misinterpretation in the course of Western history, and who nevertheless in more recent times has provided the strongest impulses toward redisclosing what is authentically Greek.

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.

Just as the faults of princes must be expiated by whole nations, the errors of great minds extend their influence over whole generations and even over centuries. They grow and propagate themselves, and finally degenerate into monstrosities. All this arises from the fact that as Berkeley says: "few men think, yet all will have opinions.

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done.

Tom DeLay fears independent thinkers and fighters. I am both.

Still, Berlin was the new center of Jewish intellectual and literary life. Writers and thinkers from the Russian Empire had fled there, and young and old now frequented the same cafés and competed for the same commissions from American Jewish publications—getting paid in dollars was the best way to survive Germany's galloping inflation. Dubnow

We learn that many great thinkers were convinced that the Bible contained the Ancient Mysteries, but not in the literal words—that the words on the pages were codes, and that the Bible is comprised of heavy-handed and useless story covering up something much more important and interesting. I get the feeling that [Dan Brown] is trying to tell me something, but I am not biting, reader.

My dear madam, the duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be explained. The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man.

It was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, crafted by flawed but brilliant thinkers who reasoned their way to a system at once sturdy and capable of change. An America that could explain me.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you're committed to progress, you can't very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

A second reason is that radical thinkers got trapped by their own moralizing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad after all.

Si uno ensalza la razón, entonces lo que importa es la integridad de los pensamientos, no las personalidades de los pensadores.

The Enlightenment thinkers were men and women of their age, the 18th century. Some were racists, sexists, anti-Semites, slaveholders, or duelists. Some of the questions they worried about are almost incomprehensible to us, and they came up with plenty of daffy ideas together with the brilliant ones. More to the point, they were born too soon to appreciate some of the keystones

The Enlightenment thinkers were men and women of their age, the 18th century. Some were racists, sexists, anti-Semites, slaveholders, or duelists. Some of the questions they worried about are almost incomprehensible to us, and they came up with plenty of daffy ideas together with the brilliant ones. More to the point, they were born too soon to appreciate some of the keystones of our modern understanding of reality.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.