Quotes About Philosophy

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ These words are also inscribed upon his grave ]

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

The Open Society and Its Enemies

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle - the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In

I would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia!

a rational analysis of the consequences of a decision does not make the decision rational; the consequences do not determine our decision; it is always we who decide.

Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.

there is no reason to believe that a definition necessarily determines the ontological status of the term defined.)

in philosophy methods are unimportant; any method is legitimate if it leads to results capable of being rationally discussed. What matters is not methods or techniques but a sensitivity to problems, and a consuming passion for them; or, as the Greeks said, the gift of wonder.

The simple truth is that truth is hard to come by, and that once found may easily be lost again.

The essential feature of dualist-interactionism is that the mind and brain are independent entities...and that they interact by quantum physics.

Denying realism amounts to megalomania.

I, however, believe that there is at least one philosophical problem, It is the problem of cosmology

Indeed, he said as late as 1976 that he would have remained a socialist all his life if he had thought that it was possible to reconcile socialist egalitarianism with freedom.

Popper was already working towards his 'fallibilist' view that theories can never be proved, although they can be decisively disproved—but it had survived a severe test, and had emerged as a theory worth embracing.

Like many others of his generation, he came to suspect that sustaining a lively and innovative economic system might place more constraints on the pursuit of equality than he had once thought.