Quotes About Philosophy

I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Open-minded people tend to be interested in Buddhism because Buddha urged people to investigate things - he didn't just command them to believe.

I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn't specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get differences.

There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

Hamlet is a remarkably easy role. Physically it's hard because it tends to be about three hours long and you're talking the whole time. But it's a simple role and it adapts itself very well, because the thing about Hamlet is, we all are Hamlet.

Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals' ideological riots sometimes kill millions.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

If you've developed an ideology that what's good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that's quite wonderful because there's no moral tension.

With scale, there always becomes this tension of, how do you keep the start-up philosophy?

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

Matter is a term contrary to soul. But nonsoul is its contradictory. Whatever is not soul is nonsoul.

In the broad and sweeping sense which the use of the term generally implies, I am not a free-trader.

You go back to T. H. Huxley, who coined the term, what he said - and I came to believe he is right - is that agnosticism asserts not only that he himself didn't know if there was a God or not, but that nobody could know.

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

The dualism itself becomes a sort of presupposition or datum; its terms condition the further problem.

Terms like 'good' and 'bad' are extremely simplistic in what is a far more complex situation.

I got fascinated with all of this work in terms of spirituality, philosophy, behavioral science when I was around 18 years old. I've been doing this for 14 years, and I've been doing it online for three years.

If I was to describe myself in terms of a political philosophy, I'd cast myself as a social and economic liberal, which is typically what people describe as being left-of-centre on social issues and right-of-centre on economic issues.

How terrible a thing time is.

I'm a libertarian. It's a terrible word.

You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.

Maybe philosophy - I love talking about ideas. Or maybe art history. I was thinking about psychology, then I got really afraid because everybody says it's terribly boring.