Quotes About Philosophy

Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life.

We are all trained by today's colleges never to take a firm stand on any subject: to be pragmatists, ready to compromise with anyone on anything. Philosophy and morality, however, do not work by compromise. Just as a healthy body cannot compromise with poison, so too a good man cannot compromise with evil ideas. In such a set up, an evil philosophy, like poison, always wins. The good can win only by being consistent. If it is not, then the evil is given the means to win every time.

The secret of the Witch Doctor's power lies in the fact that man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy, whether he is aware of his need or not—and whenever, through ignorance, cowardice or mental sloth, men choose not to be aware of it, their chronic sense of guilt, uncertainty and terror makes them feel that the Witch Doctor's philosophy is true.

Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.

In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.' "A

Happiness? But that is so middle-class. What is happiness? There are so many things in life so much more important than happiness." Keating

one cannot deal with pure evil, with the naked, full-conscious evil that neither has nor seeks justification.

No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason.

mind, Miss Taggart? My mind is not on the market any longer.

By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.

One of the ugliest characteristics of today's world is the mixture of frantic war preparations with hysterical peace propaganda, and the fact that both come from the same source—from the same political philosophy. If mankind is ever to achieve peace, the first step will be made when people realize that today's peace movements are not advocates of peace.

It's not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

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.

If, in the course of philosophical detection, you find yourself, at times, stopped by the indignantly bewildered question: "How could anyone arrive at such nonsense?"—you will begin to understand it when you discover that evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.

glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.

You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others—all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me.

Je ne considère pas les collectivistes comme des « idéalistes sincères mais abusés ». La suggestion de réduire en esclavage certains hommes pour le bien d'autres n'est pas un idéal ; la brutalité n'est pas « idéaliste », peu importe son but.

He visto mucho en esta vida -dijo de buen humor-. Y los casados no se miran uno a otro como si estuvieran pensando siempre en el dormitorio. En este mundo o se es virtuoso o se goza. Pero no las dos cosas a un tiempo; No las dos cosas.

The integrated sum of a man's basic values is his sense of life.

If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space—and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.

No hay pensamientos malvados, señor Rearden —dijo Francisco suavemente—, excepto uno: negarse a pensar.

Isn't it odd? When a politician or a movie star retires, we read front page stories about it. But when a philosopher retires, people do not even notice it." "They do, eventually.

Questions give us no rest.