Quotes About Philosophy

Lomborg and his followers make the philosophical error of thinking that things that can't be counted don't count.

the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.124

Russell Seitz and the defenders of tobacco invoked liberty, too. But as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.124 Our society has always understood that freedoms

How are we to evaluate the truth claims of science when we know that these claims may in the future be overturned? Elsewhere I have called this problem the instability of scientific truth.16 In the 1980s, philosopher Larry Laudan called it the pessimistic meta-induction of the history of science.17 He observed (as have many others) that the history of science offers many examples of scientific "truths" that were later viewed as misconceptions

There are several ways of looking at this. You could say that mankind is getting smarter, removing itself from superstition and irrationality. Or you could say that human society is denying a basic truth that human beings have verified from the dawn of time, and that in removing themselves from the idea of a Supreme Being, man is moving away from all that is spiritual and moral in the world, all that is spiritual and moral in himself.

She had been brought up to believe in God. To believe in people. To believe that evil didn't really exist, that it was simply an absence of good, the way darkness is an absence of light.

It was beyond him to resign himself to some simple, cynical generality about life. Had he been able to do so, he would have been more comfortable. But because he could not, the heaviness in his heart persisted.

Society is impossible without inequality, inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.

All the scholastic scaffolding falls, as a ruined edifice, before one single word — faith.

My son should often read and meditate on history; it is the only real philosophy

You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

All religions have been made by men.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

I often asked Laplace what he thought of God. He owned that he was an atheist.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue.

We are of the universe, and by studying the universe we ultimately turn the mirror on ourselves.

What is wrong with looking muscular? Muscles are beautiful. Strength is beautiful. Muscle tissue is beautiful. It is metabolically, medically, and philosophically beautiful. Muscles retreat when they're not used, but they will always come back if you give them good reason. No matter how old you get, your muscles never lose hope. Few cells of the body are as capable as muscle cells are of change and reformation, of achievement and transcendence.

not a body of facts, it is a way of thinking.

You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.

Still-there's no use trying to figure why things fall the way they do. Things just are, and fussing don't bring changes.

Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.