Quotes About Philosophy

This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.

Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being not even wrong. Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.

Montaigne: "Religion's surest foundation is the contempt for life.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.

And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

My challenge: Name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever.

Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were "considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.

Christopher Hitchens

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

Olen tiennyt polttavani kynttilää molemmista päistä ja todennut sen usein luovan oikein miellyttävää valoa.

In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.

the razor of Ockham is clean and decisive.

It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality.

Sartre distinguished between rebels and revolutionaries. The rebel, he says, secretly quite wants the world and the system to remain as it is. Its permanence, after all, is the guarantee of his continuing ability to rebel. The revolutionary, in contrast, really wishes to overthrow and replace existing conditions. The second enterprise is obviously no laughing matter.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

we are all stardust, or nuclear waste depending on your analysis

Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.

From a plurality of prime movers, the monotheists have bargained it down to a single one. They are getting ever nearer to the true, round figure.

To the dumb question Why me? the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes.

The belief of an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing, is a direct consequence of the premises, which you have stated. The assumption that the Universe is a design, leads to a conclusion that there are infinity of creative and created Gods, which is absurd. It is impossible indeed to prescribe limits to learned error, when Philosophy relinquishes experience and feeling for speculation.